


The Relocation

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [21]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-24 23:29:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 32,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13821741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: The yeerks are up to something  important. But the Animorphs don't know what, and the chee can't help them. Cassie's barely recovered from her time in the forest when, while tracking the yeerks, she is separated from the team again. And this time, she's a lot further away than just the forest. This time, she's ended up alone on the other side of the world.There's a mission that Cassie needs to accomplish before the yeerks find her, and she doesn't know what it is. She doesn't have any of her allies to help her. The locals are helpful, but without any concept of the broader picture, can Cassie figure out what she needs to do, and how? What will she have to sacrifice, and how will she be able to judge if it's worth it?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! I'm still looking for beta readers! Send me a message if you're interested.

My parents really didn't want me too far out of sight after the whole forest adventure.

 

I had to make a few concessions. There was no way that I could avoid seeing a counsellor, so I was working with Dr Johnson again, who was pretty nice for being an alien invader trying to coerce vulnerable kids into slavery. I had to wonder what his story was, if he was anything like Aftran had been; born in space into a desperate war, taught from birth that there was no other choice but to conquer and enslave as they tried to outrun the andalites. I wondered what his name was. I couldn't ask, of course.

 

My parents had also… well, they hadn't exactly given me a curfew, but they were pretty keen on knowing where I was after dark all the time. They'd peek around my door at night sometimes to check on me, which meant I couldn't sneak out at night any more. And they tried not to leave me alone; one of them was almost always home, and if I wanted to go out, they wanted to know which of my friends I'd be with and when I'd be back.

 

It was hard to be annoyed about all that, even if it meant I was left out of a lot of routine scouting. They loved me, and they had been scared. What annoyed me was that the Animorphs were doing the same sort of thing.

 

Rachel kept pace with me as we headed for the edge of Tobais' meadow, as if worried that if I left her sight for a second then I'd wander straight into a flooding river and get swept away. I looked up and didn't see Tobias, but the sky was almost entirely blocked by the thick canopy of trees; he could easily be up there. Jake and Marco were already at the meadow; they looked up as we approached, and Jake seemed to relax. Even Ax seemed to keep a stalk eye on me at all times.

 

I decided to ignore the whole thing. Complaining wouldn't make them less worried, and they'd settle down eventually, after everyone else had had a few more chances to nearly die and scare everyone.

 

I spread out a picnic blanket and Rachel started unpacking cake and sandwiches. Ax's eyes went wide and he immediately started morphing human.

 

“Where's Tobias?” Rachel asked.

 

“Probably off getting his mouse crème brulle out of the oven,” Marco shrugged, pulling a couple of bottles of soda and a stack of paper cups out of a backpack.

 

“How do you even know what crème brulle is, Marco?” Rachel asked.

 

“Hey, I'm cultured! I know of several fine desserts!”

 

“We were discussing what our next move against the yeerks should be,” Jake said. “This oatmeal thing seems to be dying down; I think they've cleaned up most of the fallout over the school lunch thing.”

 

There had been a lot of suspicious school camps, sporting events and other situations that took kids away from their families for a few days in the month or so since we’d poisoned the cafeteria food, little periods of time perfect for locking up hosts and waiting for their bodies to fully metabolise the oatmeal. It was hard to know just how much damage we’d done to the yeerks themselves, but keeping an eye on who went missing had at least expanded our list of known Controllers.

 

“Then we don't have much time,” Rachel said. “Hit 'em hard, keep 'em on the run. If we let them get back on their feet, it'll be that much harder to get them next time.”

 

“Harder than half the team nearly dying down in the Yeerk Pool, and getting one of our members lost and then temporarily trapped as a freaking caterpillar?” Marco snapped. “Do you have any idea how dead you would all have been if you hadn't been ridiculously lucky down there? How dead Cassie would be if she'd morphed literally any other bug? How dead we're all going to be if we try that Controller morph thing again? Because next time Visser Three won't play around, he'll just infest whoever goes down right away and learn everything.”

 

“I wasn't saying we should go down to the Pool again,” Rachel said. “But there's got to be some other way to fulfil our mission goals.”

 

“Excuse me,” Ax piped up in the few seconds between swallowing the last bite of a sandwich and selecting another, “but what are our mission goals?”

 

We were all silent for several seconds while Ax stuffed another sandwich into his mouth. <I am not questioning your strategies, Prince Jake,> he hurried to clarify as he chewed, <merely requesting clarification. I have observed that initiative is frequently required in this team and I would be able to make more effective decisions if the goals were clarified. I admit to some confusion on the matter – sometimes we seem to be working to expose the yeerk invasion to people, and other times to conceal it. In some cases civilian protection is a high priority and in others it is not. What are our objectives?>

 

We were silent for a bit longer.

 

“That,” Jake said finally, “is probably something we should sort out.”

 

“We're holding the fort until the andalites get here,” Rachel said. “Slowing them down. Stopping them from taking over Earth.”

 

<But how?> Tobias asked, landing on a nearby branch. <Ax-man is right. We need a strategy.>

 

“Where were you?” Rachel asked.

 

<Seeing how many chee are here.> He looked at Ax. <It's just the two.>

 

“There are two chee here?” I asked, looking around as if I somehow expected to be able to see them.

 

<Or two groups. Two holograms, anyway.>

 

“I told you it wouldn't work,” Erek said, stepping out of an old tree behind me that promptly vanished.

 

“You tipped them off,” Jenny grumbled, standing where a large rock had been moments earlier.

 

“I didn't have to. Tobias and Aximili live in this forest. A dumpster appearing on a corner is one thing, but trees and rocks don't spring up overnight.”

 

“Excuse me,” Marco said, crossing his arms, “were you guys spying on us? Not cool, man.”

 

“I'm sorry,” Erek said, “it wasn't my idea. I was worried she'd get into trouble without me.”

 

“Oh, I'd get into trouble? Because I'm the one who comes up with the ridiculous plans, clearly. Like when we were infested, it was _me_ who – ”

 

“Why,” Jake interrupted in the tone of somebody holding onto his very last shred of patience, “were you spying on us?”

 

Erek crossed his arms and looked at Jenny. She sighed.

 

“We wanted to know what… what yeerk projects you were looking into.”

 

“We have this marvellous human social quirk called asking questions,” Marco informed her. “I guess you must have missed it in your millennia of blending in in our society, but it's really neat. It cuts your spying time in half at least!”

 

“Normally we would have,” Erek said apologetically. “But this is...” he exchanged a glance with Jenny… “It's difficult to explain.”

 

“We can't explain,” Jenny said, shaking her head. “You were right, Erek, this was a mistake. We have to go.”

 

She vanished behind a suddenly existing bush, but Tobias wasn't having any of it. He dropped from the branch and swooped directly at the bush, which winked out of existence moments before he crushed his bird body against it, then banked and landed on her shoulder. <Uh-uh. You're gonna creep around like this, we want to know why.>

 

“We can't.”

 

“She's right,” Erek added with a shrug. “We can't talk about this. It’s not that we don’t want to. We straight-up can’t. That's why we didn't just call you.”

 

“Is this a pacifism thing?” Marco asked.

 

“It's a treaty thing,” Jenny said.

 

“A treaty thing.” Jake didn't look happy.

 

Erek glanced at Jenny, then shrugged. “We had to make… compromises… with certain people we met on our way to Earth. Non-interference treaties, mostly. We don't get in their way, they don't get in ours.”

 

“Erek!”

 

“What? I'm pretty sure vaguely mentioning the existence of treaties doesn't violate anything.”

 

“We really have to go.” Jenny gently moved Tobias to a nearby branch. “Sorry. We shouldn't have come here. It won't happen again.”

 

<I would hope that that is the case,> Ax said, his stern thoughtspeak in jarring opposition to the egg sandwich filling dripping off his chin.

 

We let them go. We waited in silence as Tobias followed the pair a reasonable distance, did another circuit, and returned to his branch.

 

“That,” Marco said, “was really weird.”

 

“Man, I hope they don't do that often,” Rachel moaned. “They can look like anything or anyone. We'd never find them.”

 

“It might be for the best, actually,” Jake said thoughtfully. “We have chee pretending to be us sometimes, the more they know the better. And they're our allies. And pacifists.”

 

“I don't like it,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “I do _not_ want so-called allies spying on me.”

 

“We spy on a lot of people. Pee-pul-luh,” Ax pointed out, pouring himself some soda.

 

“Yeah, potential enemies. Potential threats.”

 

“We're potential threat to the chee,” I shrugged. “Their livelihood depends on us keeping our mouths shut.” But I didn't like the thought, either.

 

“Chee spying aren't weird,” Marco said. “They spy on people, that's like one of the most basic things we know about them. What's weird is how they were talking.”

 

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

 

“I mean that they were talking. How often do you see chee have a conversation, except to maintain their cover? They usually have some kind of mind-link thing.”

 

<Chee-net,> Tobias provided, preening a wing.

 

“Yeah, that. But they did an awful lot of chatting for people who couldn't tell us anything. Whatever they're not telling us about must really need us looking into it.”

 

“No,” Jake said, “not now. If we start speculating on the chee we'll have be off on another mission without thinking about it and we'll probably get nothing useful done. Big picture first. Then worry about the chee.”

 

“Okay,” I said, “what's our big picture here, then?”

 

“Keep the yeerks on the run,” Rachel provided. “Stop them from spreading as much as we can until the andalites get here.”

 

<And get information,> Tobias added. <The andalites will need that. Yeerk Pool entrances and Controllers and stuff.>

 

“If we keep them on the run, it's going to date our information,” I pointed out. “They have to keep adapting to us. When we find information, do we exploit it, or keep it?”

 

“There's no point in waiting for other people to show up and exploit it for us,” Rachel said. “We don't know how long they'll take to get here, but information dates all the time. That can't stop us.”

 

“What about Earth forces?” Marco asked. “This doesn't actually need to be our problem, if we can expose the invasion. That's still on the table.”

 

Jake nodded. “Ax, what would the yeerks do if humanity found out about the invasion?”

 

Ax considered the question. <What would humanity do?> he asked.

 

“Fight,” Rachel said. “Bring in the military or something.”

 

“Quarantine the whole area,” Marco added. “Imprison known Controllers, if they could. Blow up the Yeerk Pool, probably.”

 

<Then they would die,> Ax said simply. <The yeerks infiltrate secretly to avoid the unnecessary destruction of potential hosts. But Visser Three is much stronger in open combat. If there was no more to be gained by secrecy, then he would engage humanity in open combat, take who could be taken and destroy who could not, and burn the planet in his wake.>

 

We all gaped silently.

 

“We'd have a chance, though, right?” Rachel asked.

 

<No. Even if your primitive weapons proved a problem, the yeerks would destroy your military from space, where you are weak. Their limitation would simply be how many human hosts they could maintain in space, so far from their manufacturing centres. That would dictate the speed of the takeover, and it would simply be a matter of whether the andalites arrived before they had the resources to maintain all of the potential hosts in space. More likely, your military would not prove that much of a problem, and they would simply continue to spread out from a ground-based Pool.>

 

That wasn't a nice thought.

 

“Okay,” Marco said weakly, “we don't try to go public.”

 

“Speaking of information,” I said, digging around in the bag I’d brought with me, “I brought something for you, Ax.” I handed him a small notebook. He flipped through it, careful not to get any egg sandwich on it.

 

<Your thought-speak range experiments?> he asked, still chewing.

 

I nodded. “It turned out to be useful on Leera. I made a copy of all the data for you, in case it becomes useful again. I know, I know, you’re not an expert on this stuff, but you can do more with it than I can and there’s no harm in everyone knowing as much as possible.” I handed out notebooks to everyone else, too.

 

“Is this why you wanted us to collect all our known Controller lists for you?” Jake asked, flicking through his.

 

I nodded. “You should all have a complete list in there. I also dug through all my notes and tried to put together anything else I thought might be vaguely useful or important.”

 

I waited for Tobias to morph human and handed his over. He flicked to the back. “We know more Yeerk Pool entrances than this,” he said. “I’ll list the others for everyone and the parts of their security that I know.”

 

“Do you know who uses what entrances?” Jake asked him.

 

“Some. But they change around a lot. I can draft up Controller schedules, but they tend to change.”

 

“It’s not critical,” Jake said, “but if you find yourself with any spare time, it’s worth considering. We might need a disguise in a hurry, even if we don’t have a way to con the biofilters yet.”

 

“And that information you got from Elfangor,” I added quickly. “You said awhile ago it was fading. Do you still have any of it?”

 

He shrugged. “Some. I’ll note down everything I know.”

 

“We’re getting off-topic again,” Marco said. “Hey, do we know – no, no, we can do this later.” He firmly shut his notebook. “Mission goals. We push forward, we keep them on the run, we don’t expose the invasion to the public or we’ll have full-on war.”

 

“What missions do we have on the go right now?” Jake asked. He started counting on his fingers as he spoke. I scrounged for a pen to take notes. “This oatmeal thing is dying down, but we still might have a couple of weeks’ chaos in it. Do we want to poison the school’s milk again?”

 

“No point,” Tobias said as he carefully selected a small pastry from the picnic food that Ax hadn’t eaten yet. “Even if they don’t know exactly what we did, it has to be obvious that we got to the school food somehow. They won’t let it happen again.”

 

“And we’re not attacking the Pool again,” Marco said firmly.

 

Jake nodded. “Okay, so we have some chaos to take advantage of, but we’re not sure how yet.”

 

“How?” Rachel snorted. “We find the new Kandrona. Smash it. Don’t give them a moment’s peace. We just need to figure out how.”

 

<I am sure that they will have emergency protocols in place,> Ax said. <They were caught off-guard once. They will not be caught so again. We would not kill so many yeerks a second time.>

 

“Oh no,” Rachel said, a wicked little smile curling her lips, “this isn’t about killing them.”

 

I understood. “It’s about morale,” I explained. “Paranoia. Rachel wants to make it clear to the Empire that we can hit them wherever we want, whenever we want, and that nothing they do will be enough. We destroy their food source; they start to climb back. We poison their Pool, they start to climb back. We destroy their food source again. It’s not about numbers, it’s about panic.”

 

Rachel nodded. “We keep them on their toes. We make them spend so much time and energy trying to protect themselves from us that they can’t advance.”

 

“And we sow dissent in their ranks,” I said thoughtfully. “The yeerks, the everyday soldiers I mean, they’re here because they feel they have no choice. They put their faith in Visser Three, the war hero, to keep them safe.”

 

“He beheads people at random when he’s mad!” Marco said, disbelievingly.

 

“Individuals, yes. The Empire, no. They follow the system because it’s the safest they think they can be, but if we prove them wrong...”

 

“Then the Empire has to waste time trying to keep their own under control.” Jake nodded. “Divide and conquer. Look at how much of a mess this oatmeal addiction left them in. Okay, that’s a mission on the books: we find a way to keep them feeling unsafe. The Kandrona if we can find it. But keep your minds open for other ideas, too; we needed a superpowerful alien to help us find it last time. What else do we have going on?”

 

“Ax and I have been information-gathering,” Tobias said. “Nothing major has come up recently, but if there’s anything specific we need...”

 

“Keep on the Pool entrance charting for now,” Jake said. “What else?”

 

“Project _Ehk_ _o_ _l_ ,” I pointed out. “This ‘pipeline’ thing, with the vaccinations and some sort of scientific trial… we still don’t know what it is.”

 

“Right,” Jake said, nodding. “That’s three things in our sights right now. Anything else?”

 

“The exit thing with my dad seems to work,” Rachel said. “So, I mean, we should probably be funnelling more people out that way. As many as we can. We should try to have a Controller in that shack as often as possible, without looking suspicious.”

 

Everybody very carefully didn’t look at Jake. We all knew his stake in that strategy. I’d set things up with Rachel’s dad because I wanted a way to get innocent people out of the city without killing them, and we probably weren’t using it as much as we should have been. If somebody went missing every month, every fortnight, every week, we could save a lot of people. We could make the Empire more paranoid, afraid to walk around alone. And we could make if far less suspicious if somebody important happened to vanish every once in a while. Somebody like Tom.

 

I thought of yeerks in that shed, scared, their hosts tied up, knowing that a painful death was approaching and there was nobody to help. I said nothing, for Jake’s sake.

 

But Jake just nodded at this information and ticked off another finger. “Right. Anything else going on right now?”

 

We all looked at each other and shrugged.

 

“No Star Defenders with a cry for help? No time-stopping space jerks with riddles and missions? Ket and Jara don’t need saving from anything?”

 

We shook our heads.

 

“Okay then. Chee.”

 

“Ax-man,” Tobias said, “they mentioned having to make treaties on their way here. Have any insight on that?”

 

Ax gulped the last of his soda and wiped his mouth. “A treaty is a treaty. Tree-teeee. Treeeti.” He shrugged. “That they made them in space is not particularly special. There are thousands of spacefaring races that they may have contacted, and given that this was millennia ago, there were probably thousands more that my people have never heard of.” He considered this a moment. “Herrrrd-ovvvv-vuh,” he added.

 

“So they made a treaty we don’t know about, with aliens we don’t know about, thousands of years ago, about something to do with yeerk plans, and it’s important enough for them to spy on us but they can’t tell us what it is,” Rachel summarised.

 

“They mentioned non-interference treaties,” I said, “so it can’t be with the yeerks, hork-bajir, or taxxons. They interfere with those all the time.”

 

“Furthermore, those species only relatively recently attained spaceflight,” Ax said. “And the chee… cheee-chee-cheeee… are keeping their existence se-cret-tuh from them.” Ax pondered the issue. “The most likely scenario is a trading deal,” he said. “The yeerks are unlikely to welcome other species to Earth, unless of course they have infested them, but they may have traded for some sort of new weapon.”

 

“And the chee can’t interfere with it?” Jake asked.

 

“Without seeing the treaty, I do not know. I would presume … preee-zyooooom-muh… that they would be free to do so once the weapon were delivered and the traders departed, but perhaps that is too late.”

 

“Spying on the chee won’t tell us much if they use chee-net,” Tobias mused. “So I guess that just leaves us with the yeerks like always.”

 

Jake nodded. “Whatever’s going on, it was important enough for the chee to risk losing our trust with this spying stunt, and dance on the edge of this treaty they’re so wary of to let us know about it with their chatter and terrible hiding,” he said. “Somehow, I get the feeling that we can’t afford to screw this one up.”


	2. Chapter 2

I had to get home before my parents started to worry, so I left the rest of the Animorphs to puzzle out the mystery together while I cleaned out some bird cages. We’d gotten much nicer cages since Unibank had started sponsoring the Clinic. Dad was talking about resealing the barn floor, too.

I supposed that I should get to work on my homework and try to catch up on the month of school I’d missed. I had been barely passing, even with Natalie’s help, before I went missing; there was no way I was going to catch up. My teachers were giving me a lot of leeway due to all the trauma and missed school, but they couldn’t bend the rules for me – either I was going to have the knowledge to move up a grade at the end of the year, or I wasn’t. It was seriously starting to look like I wasn’t. And I did not want to go to summer school.

Dr Johnson had remarked that I seemed more driven, more focused, since my return, and he was right. But drive wasn’t enough. I could still barely sleep from the nightmares, and I still couldn’t pay full attention without worrying about which of my classmates might kill me over a slip of the tongue, and I still just didn’t have any time.

I finished cleaning a cage and hoisted it up onto another. It slipped down the last couple of inches with a crash that earned me several reproachful stares from Clinic inmates.

“Oh, like you could’ve done better,” I told a hawk, who preened loftily, looking just like a slightly smaller Tobias.

“Cassie?” Mom’s voice called from the direction of the house. I rushed out to see what she wanted before the thought I’d gotten lost again.

She was on the porch. As soon as she saw me, she called, “Natalie can’t come over tomorrow, says it’s too busy. You mind having your session tonight instead?”

I waved to tell her it was fine and she went back inside, presumably to talk on the phone to Natalie. Natalie had never rescheduled before, although once or twice she’d sent another chee with her hologram. I didn’t spend too much time wondering what the problem was; who knew what alien robots needed to do with their time?

Natalie, for her part, didn’t mention a single thing about alien treaties or yeerks for our entire session. She explained some math. She had me explain it back to her. We did some math. She left. It seemed that there was a limit to how many hints the chee were willing to give us.

It was almost sunset when Tobias showed up and tapped at my bedroom window. I let him in.

<So guess who’s all booked in for a private trip on a civilian human airplane? His title starts with V and ends in a number.>

I blinked at him. “How did you find… ?”

<Chapman doesn’t look over his shoulder and he thinks “Mr. Visser” is a decent code name. We should follow him more often, he’s a fountain of puzzling, half-complete information.>

“But why an airplane? He has Bug fighters! He has alien fleets! He has his Blade ship! For what possible reason could he want to take an airplane anywhere?!”

<Good question.> Tobias preened a wing. <We should look into that. Problem is, we know the airport, but we still don’t know when this is happening. We can stake the place out, but we can’t have everyone there all the time. If we’re just waiting to spot Visser Three, any scout won’t have time to go get everyone.>

“Have you told the others?”

<I’ve told Jake. Figured I might as well drop in on you on the way home. He’ll call a meeting tomorrow to plan for it. What time does your tutoring thing happen again?>

“Actually, we… oh.” I put my head in my hands. Of course. “I know when the flight’s happening. It’ll be at or before five tomorrow. Probably before.”

<That soon? How do you know?>

“My tutor? She’s a chee. She rescheduled to today because tomorrow will be ‘too busy’.”

<She probably has other stuff going on.>

“I’m sure she does, but usually she sends another chee wearing her face. She’s never rescheduled before. She said tomorrow will be too busy, but...”

<You think she meant too busy for us.>

“Yeah.”

<They’re not being very subtle, are they?>

“They must really need our help.”

<You know what I reckon?>

“What?”

<I reckon that when we call Erek and explain that we need four chee on very short notice to stand in for four Animorphs while we scout this out, he’ll just so happen to have four chee around who have arranged to be free at the right time for no particular reason.>

“I hope you’re right, because my parents are still barely letting me out of their sight. It’s getting very – ” I stopped. Blushed. Tobias had never had the problem I had, even before he was a hawk. He hadn’t had family to worry about him. I hadn’t even seen any missing person notices when he went missing. He’d vanished without a ripple, and now he was trapped as a hawk. And I’d vanished with a splash and gotten stuck, as stuck as he was… except by some miracle, the chance of picking the right morph, it hadn’t stuck. I’d been a nothlit who had ended up back in my human body, back as Cassie, still able to be an Animorph. I’d walked back into a loving family. I wondered if he hated me a little bit. He’d have to, wouldn’t he? And he didn’t even know about my initial plan to trap myself as a wolf on purpose.

But if Tobias had found anything strange in my words, he didn’t show it. <So we can assume we’ll be occupied at five tomorrow, but do we know when this whole thing will start?>

“No.” I sighed. “I’m not going to get any sleep tonight, am I?”

<I’ll get the crew together.>

 


	3. Chapter 3

Half an hour later, a chee climbed in my window and looked me over. Within a few seconds, I was looking at a perfect copy of myself. The chee was careful not to ask any questions whatsoever about our mission.

 

I morphed owl and headed for the airport. Tobias directed us together and soon we were a parliament of six little barn owls perched on a terminal roof. Very few planes were moving in or out, and we hadn’t recognised any Controllers in the airport yet, but that meant little. What if the Visser was in a new morph, accompanied by Controllers we didn’t know? He could walk right on by us. We had almost no idea what we needed to do or how, and everyone was nervous.

 

The boys, of course, combated this in their usual way.

 

<I’m just saying,> Jake said, <you can’t say ‘Superman would beat Batman if Batman didn’t have Kryptonite’, because Batman _always_ has Kryptonite. It’s what he does. He’s Batman. >

 

<Wow,> Marco replied, tossing his owl head disdainfully, <that’s your position, really? It’s like you didn’t even read Apocalypse.>

 

<And who won there, hmm?>

 

<That wasn’t a win, it was a planned defeat. Batman knew he couldn’t win; his plan was just not to die. Also… no Kryptonite.>

 

<Our plan is to not die quite a lot of the time,> Tobias put in. <I’d say it’s a valid strategy.>

 

<A tactical retreat is a valid strategy, too, but – >

 

<Look,> Rachel said quickly. <Does that look weird to you guys?>

 

She was looking at the limousines that had just pulled up. Three of them. They were identical, down to the number plates. Out of each, about ten people climbed out; each set of people looked almost identical, with similar clothing and covered faces. I looked to the tarmac. Three planes were taxiing into position. I don’t know much about airplanes, but they were pretty small ones.

 

<Oh, great,> Marco moaned. <It’s like a spy novel.>

 

<What do we do, Prince Jake?> Ax asked.

 

Jake hesitated. <Split up,> he finally said. <No choice. Two to a plane. Cassie, you’re with me.>

 

Great, I was being treated like fragile glass again. I went to protest, but everyone was already flying for a plane. I swallowed my pride and followed Jake. We landed on the far wing, out of anyone’s sight, and quickly demorphed and morphed fly. We buzzed over to land above the passenger door and waited for the plane to stop moving and open for passengers.

 

<Air travel can be so expensive these days,> I remarked. <Think of the money we’re saving.>

 

<Truly, the purpose of advanced alien technology,> Jake said drily.

 

<I’m not taking that kind of advice from somebody who used said technology to get into a concert for free,> I said.

 

<Of course. Unlike your completely serious and responsible use of the power at all times.>

 

<… No comment.>

 

The door was opened. We crept in.

 

<Don’t get seen,> Jake said, unnecessarily. <You know how touchy these guys get about bugs.>

 

<Yeah, I do not want to be in a flying plane when they pull out the bug spray,> I agreed. <Under the seats?>

 

We moved under the seats.

 

<Towards the back, near the bathrooms,> Jake said. <In case we need somewhere to duck and demorph in a hurry.> He sounded stressed. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t like working in such small teams for an important, unknown mission either… but it was probably worse for him, I realised. I tended to sort of do my own thing a lot, and when I was working with the team, I mostly followed orders. It was different for Jake. He was the leader; his job was to know what needed doing and where everyone needed to be. He was used to working with all six of us, or at the very least four or five while somebody played scout or decoy. A team of two on a mission? This wasn’t his normal playing field. And we didn’t know what we were doing, except that it was important. Or if we were even on the right plane. There was a two-thirds chance that we were on a decoy plane and this whole mission would happen without us.

 

<Jake,> I said, <are you worried about the others?>

 

<Huh?>

 

<I mean, I know you don’t like splitting up like this. But they’re all capable Animorphs. Tobias works alone all the time, Rachel couldn’t be killed by a nuclear explosion, Marco was born to think his way out of weird situations, and Ax is at least partly trained for this sort of thing.>

 

<I know that, Cassie,> he said, as if I was saying something very obvious. Which I supposed I was.

 

<Okay. Well, good.>

 

<I just don’t like walking into danger unprepared, especially in a very small team. No matter which of us are on that team.>

 

<You’re wondering if we should’ve just picked a plane and all six of us should’ve gone on it, huh?>

 

<I thought about it,> he admitted, <but I don’t know if we can afford to pick wrong. And six flies would be much harder to hide from paranoid Controllers.>

 

<They aren’t paranoid if we really are watching them!> I quipped. The plane didn’t have first class or coach sections and it wasn’t difficult to move to the very back seats by flying low to the floor. <This is weird, though, right?>

 

<Super weird.>

 

<They didn’t seem to be carrying luggage, maybe it’s a short trip?>

 

<They could have whatever they need at the destination. Or have somebody else bring their luggage. We’re not going to be able to notice it being loaded in these forms.>

 

<True.>

 

The Controllers all settled into their seats. There was no casual chatter or confusion over seats. This was a team who had a mission and knew what they were doing. I wished that the same could be said of us.

 

“Pre-takeoff count,” somebody announced, and went down the aisle, counting heads.

 

<Here’s the thing, though,> Jake mused. <Why aircraft? Why not Bug fighters? If they’re trying to be secret, using human vehicles at all just creates another way to track them.>

 

<Maybe they’re going somewhere that only aircraft can get in? A human facility?> I suggested.

 

<Maybe. But this still seems a strange way to do it. Marco was right, this is spy novel stuff. Three identical planes, probably only one related to the mission; that’s what you do to avoid being followed.>

 

<They might think our intel is better than it is,> I said. <Maybe they think we can trace their fighters anyway, and that we wouldn’t check human civilian stuff, and they booked three just in case.>

 

<That just makes it more likely we’ll notice though, especially in the middle of the night. The only – oh.>

 

<What? What is it?>

 

<Cassie, I don’t think they’re trying to hide from us.>

 

<What do you mean?>

 

<They have to know we can’t track them,> Jake explained, <because they do yeerk stuff that we can’t see all the time. We mostly interfere when they interfere with human stuff. They have to have noticed that. But we’re not the only players in the game, are we? You know who probably can track yeerk stuff way better than human stuff, and who would probably ignore the other human stuff?>

 

I wondered whether he was getting at the yeerks discovering the chee or the Star Defenders, but no, neither of them fit. <Who?> I asked.

 

<Other yeerks is who. I think our dear little airplane Controllers are working behind someone’s back. Or racing someone.>

 

<Isn’t this Chapman and Visser Three’s plan though? Who does Visser Three need to hide his schemes from?>

 

<I don’t know, but I’d sure love to find out.>

 

<It’s a pretty big conclusion to draw on so little.>

 

<I know. But we should keep it in mind. We’ve seen Vissers fight before. What if someone found something important? Something the chee can’t help with because of their treaties?>

 

The head counter finished their run. “Pre-takeoff fumigation. Prepare for gas,” they announced.

 

Fumigation?

 

<Abort!> Jake shouted in my mind. <Front door’s still open!>

 

We took to the air. Or at least, Jake took to the air. I launched myself upward, almost brushing the edge of a seat, and just as I went to dash forward, a hand came down at just the wrong angle. It had been shielded by the seat; I didn’t see it until the very last moment. I tried to dodge, but it brushed the side of my body, shattering my wing. I fell to the floor, unable to fly.

 

Just as the hiss of gas began.


	4. Chapter 4

The strike hadn’t been intentional. The Controller still didn’t know I was there as I tried to regain my footing under the chair.

 

<Cassie?> Jake called, still motoring for the door. He’d lost sight of me.

 

<I’m at the door!> I lied. <Hurry up!> No reason for him to get himself killed doing something dumb and heroic. Jake sped up, aiming for the exit.

 

Now there was just me to worry about.

 

I couldn’t fly. I could walk, but there was no way I could make it to the door on foot. And if the yeerks were fumigating a full airplane, it had to be for us, meaning that whatever they were using definitely had bug spray in it. I needed to move before the gas made it impossible.

 

Safe demorph spaces… outside, too far… under seats, too visible… overhead storage, haha, impossible… bathroom it was.

 

On my six little fly legs, I motored for the bathroom. The hissing sound was buried under a louder sound, a deep hum from all directions – had to be the airplane engines. Meaning that the doors were closed and we’d soon be taking off. No escape. But I just had to move around one little corner, squeeze through one little door, and I could demorph.

 

I was almost around the corner when my legs gave out.

 

It wasn’t the first time I’d been poisoned with bug spray. I knew the drill. My muscles would stop responding, and then I’d stop getting enough oxygen, and then I’d pass out and die, assuming a Controller didn’t spot and squish me first. Before that happened, I had to make the few inches to the bathroom. No trouble at all for a fly. At least, a fly who could move.

 

I willed my little legs to move. One twitched feebly.

 

The weakness swamped my mind. Soon, I wouldn’t have the focus to demorph, bathroom or not. The Controllers behind me were silent. Were they all still lined up in their seats, staring forward? Would any look back?

 

No choice. If they saw me, they’d kill me… but if I did nothing, I’d die anyway. I focused on my human self and tried, in my muzzy state, to control the morph as much as I could. I didn’t need to be big, I didn’t need to be recognisably human, but I needed to be able to move.

 

Soft flesh ballooned unevenly from my spindly fly legs. I tried to crawl forward, but no bones had grown in to replace the rapidly melting exoskeleton, so I just twitched as my hard, shiny casing vanished and I started to grow. Soon I was a wriggling, squirming blob about two inches long. A bit of fleshy floor debris.

 

Lungs and bones, lungs and bones… my whole body was burning with the need for oxygen, but something in me just wanted to grow, grow to full size. I couldn’t let it. Growth was death for me; growth into something human-looking was death for all of us. I wriggled two fleshy protrubances near the front of my body and willed myself to remember what arms looked like. Radius, ulna, elbow… something stiffened inside. Bones! A joint! Muscles and tendons slid into place and I moved it, clawed at the floor. Were they still pumping in gas? Over the engines, I couldn’t tell… and there was something else in my mind, something desperate and screaming. Jake’s voice. He was screaming my name.

 

Jake had to wait. Distraction was death. Another elbow, yes, good… crawl forward, military-style, bit by bit… did I have shoulders yet? Didn’t matter. They were anchored to something. They would do. Just a couple more body lengths. The little crack of the partly-ajar door was a couple of body lengths away. My arms grew to nearly the length of my body, a few simple bones under flesh and topped by a bulbous, formless mass that would, in time, be hands. But not yet. I didn’t have the energy to waste on hands yet.

 

It was so hard to think… what had I forgotten? Lungs. How did lungs work again? Did I have human blood for them? Did I have a heart strong enough? Forward, forward… around the gap… it was so hard to focus enough to control the morph… I squeezed my growing body through the gap, not caring how it crushed my sides, rolled in, and threw everything I had left into demorphing as quickly as possible.

 

It was easier, without the need for control, but still a struggle. Everything in me trembled. I couldn’t remember, exactly, what I looked like, but the image of myself that the Animorphs had scored into my mind a week ago was still there, like a healing wound; that would do. I latched onto that memory instead and grew upward, ribs pushing through flesh, mouth softening and splitting open; as soon as I was able, I drew a deep, shuddering breath. Air!

 

I had enough presence of mind not to cough. If the yeerks heard me… well, that wouldn’t be good. I stayed as still as possible as limbs filled out, hair grew, bones took their proper shape. Jake’s desperate voice in my mind was already dimming; he must have gotten out of the plane okay. In my human body, I couldn’t answer him.

 

I had to morph again, right away. What did I have? Fly, cockroach and spider would be poisoned. Bat and rat were too big. That left me with… caterpillar, maybe? Would a caterpillar be poisoned? Maybe. Maybe not. But I was intimately acquainted with a caterpillar’s senses, and there was no way it would give me enough information about when I needed to demorph. Besides, the one and only time I’d used that morph, I’d lost myself and been trapped, and I still wasn’t sure how to handle that. What else did I have?

 

<Cassie! Cassie, are you okay?! Oh, god no – Cassie!> Jake’s voice drowned out the beginning cries of alarm from the other Animorphs. I had to answer them.

 

Jake. Lizard. Green anole. That would do.

 

I focused.

 

Compared to a fly, an anole might as well be a human. Same number of limbs, very similar skeleton. My skin went rough and pebbly, my fingers merged and changed position. I shrank. As soon as I had thoughtspeak, I called privately, <Jake! Guys! I’m okay, I’m alive; I just have to – >

 

But my mind was already silent. They were out of range, and no morph could keep up with an airplane.

 

I was alone.


	5. Chapter 5

Well this was just great. I’d been home a week and already I’d found a way to get stranded and presumed dead again. At this rate, when I got home Rachel would permanently handcuff herself to me and Marco would start slipping tracking devices into my morphing outfit.

 

That was a later problem. My current problem was getting off the plane.

 

The others, had they been alright? Had they been poisoned? They’d been calling for me, but I’d been distracted… had everyone been there, except Jake? Who had and hadn’t been calling?

 

I couldn’t remember. Nothing I could do about that now, anyway. The other Animorphs would have to look after each other; I had to escape. From a moving airplane. In the sky. Without being seen.

 

Great.

 

I motored my little lizard legs and got up off the floor, looking for a crevice to hide in. Being a bright green lizard in a flat white room was making me nervous. How fast did airplanes move? I had a goose morph that could fly practically forever, but would I be able to find my way home even if I got out? Again, no choice but to figure that out when I got to it. More immediate questions: how was I supposed to get out of an airplane cabin in flight? And what did I have that could survive a fall from an airplane?

 

Cockroach, probably. I wouldn’t trust any of my birds to handle it, but a cockroach might. Of course, I couldn’t morph a cockroach in the cabin. I had to find a way to get rid of the poison before I could morph to escape… how long would it hang around? Would it hang around forever? How did air move through an airplane; did it ever clear? I’d read once that people got sick more on airplanes because they recycled the air, did that mean they’d recycle the poison? Was that even true about getting sick more? I should’ve picked up some small morphs on Leera. There had been all kinds of weird life there; I’d bet anything that they had something tiny and immune to bug spray. The perfect opportunity, and I hadn’t even thought of it!

 

The door to the bathroom opened. I squeezed myself into the paper towel dispenser and held still. The door was closed, and soon, I heard a very quiet male voice, almost a mumble. I struggled to make out the words.

 

“Number six in position, ma’am. Yes, I’ve confirmed the plane. Very soon I’ll have a location and report on the nature of the device. I’m sure they don’t suspect, but… you can guarantee his protection? You know what the Visser’s people will do to me if… yes, exactly. We can’t afford more upsets like this right now. I’ll report when I have the details. Kandrona shine and strengthen you.”

 

The door opened. The man left.

 

Well that was great. That was just great. Not only was escape probably physically impossible, it seemed that it wasn’t even a strategic option any more.

 

It seemed that I was the only Animorph on the right plane.

There are questions that tend to crowd the mind when one is trapped alone in a flying cabin full of enemies with no real understanding of what is happening. Questions like ‘How am I supposed to survive this?’ ‘How will I keep time and know when to demorph?’ ‘Is there anywhere safer to demorph than an unlocked, easily accessible bathroom where enemies could walk in on me helpless at any moment?’ ‘What exactly am I supposed to do to stop these guys from doing whatever thing they’re supposed to do when we get to where we’re going?’ ‘How will I know when I’ve accomplished the mission, and how will I get home?’ The answers for these questions were not very forthcoming.

 

First job: clock, and safe demorphing space. Not as easy as it sounded. Being spotted would mean death; there was nowhere to escape to. Which was better, staying in the bathroom and taking the chance on demorphing there, or scouting and taking the chance on being spotted? If I could get down into the luggage area, I’d be safe, but I knew nothing about the layout of a plane. Was there a way down there?

 

Instead, I might be able to hide in the overhead storage lockers, but trying to demorph in there would probably cause noise. And if they checked, I’d be helpless. A helpless teenage girl in a plane full of Controller witnesses. Pilot’s cabin would be occupied, the little area down the back with tea and snacks would probably be occupied. What else did planes have?

 

After awhile, I crept out of the bathroom and made a dash for the bottom of the seats. How long had I been in morph? Ten minutes? I felt lost without Ax’s timekeeping. If I could find a clock somewhere… a watch, maybe… I could build some sense of a schedule.

 

The Controllers became more and more relaxed as we flew further from the city. They started chattering with each other and settling down with books and magazines. That they’d brought books wasn’t a good sign – it probably meant a long journey. It probably meant that there’d be some demorphing after all.

 

I clung to the bottom of a seat. Below me was an oversized handbag. Aside from the usual – makeup, spare pens, receipts, all that stuff – a Dracon beam and a large sheaf of paper had been jammed inside. The writing on it wasn’t in English; it wasn’t any language I was familiar with. Its owner reached down, pulled the papers and a pen out, and from the sounds of it, had decided to spend the journey catching up on paperwork.

 

I dashed into the handbag. If I leaned back at just the right angle… yes, hidden in the bag, I could just make out the face of the woman’s watch as she wrote. Two minutes after midnight. I couldn’t have been in morph for more than twenty minutes yet, so if we were still in the air at one-thirty, I’d demorph then. Plenty of time to think of a safe way to do it.

 

I hunkered down in the handbag to wait.

 

By one-thirty, most of the Controllers had pushed their seats back and fallen asleep. It wasn’t often that I saw groups of Controllers so relaxed. Usually when I had anything to do with Controllers, they were chasing us down, or on the lookout for us, or on edge because Visser Three was lurking about. If Visser Three had boarded the aircraft, I hadn’t recognised his morph, and nobody had said a word about andalite bandits – apparently they felt safe in their fumigated little cabin speeding away from the Pool, the Visser, and us. The woman above me was snoring faintly, wrist dangling at an angle that made it just possible to read her watch. I made a dash for the bathroom and demorphed without any trouble.

 

A plane full of sleeping Controllers, on an important mission that I needed to stop. None of them suspected that I was there. And I knew where a Dracon beam was, in that handbag. I could take them out, one by one… burn through the door into the cockpit… jump and morph before the crash and hope for the best...

 

It would be so, so easy. Dangerous, but easy.

 

No. No, killing everyone wasn’t the way to do this. I had to get as many people through this war alive as possible, human and yeerk. I focused on the lizard within me.

 

At three fifteen, almost everyone was still asleep – another easy remorph. The five am remorph wasn’t any more difficult. I spent some time searching the plane for a better demorph spot, but there weren’t all that many private, hidden spaces. By six forty-five, some people were up and about, and the remorph was a bit more stressful as I rushed through the changes, hoping against hope that somebody didn’t walk into the bathroom at the exact wrong moment. By eight o’clock, I was starting to get a bit nervous about the length of the flight. Wherever we were, we had definitely passed beyond a reasonable flight range for any of my morphs, and I had no other way home. I did not want to have to try to sneak home on a yeerk transport right after foiling their plans. How many days would it take a goose to cross the same space that an airplane did in eight hours? How would I keep track of morph time? Would I be able to make that kind of journey over the ocean, unable to stop to sleep?

 

If only we’d had time to prepare for this mission, I could’ve tried to acquire one of the Controllers and wouldn’t have to hide. But I couldn’t do that in the air; even if I had managed to acquire one without being noticed while they were asleep, how would I get rid of them? There was nowhere to hide a stunned Controller. I didn’t even know how long somebody could be stunned with a Dracon beam before they’d wake up.

 

We’d been in the air for over half a day before I hit trouble. I was hunkered in the bathroom, human, focusing on the lizard within me. How long had it been since I’d slept? I’d had none that night; I couldn’t risk napping in morph. The night before had been plagued with nightmares. How long since I’d spent this much time pretty much constantly in morph? The Royan Island base? I couldn’t remember, so much had been going on at the time… there had been adrenalin to help, not this long, slow plane ride…

 

I just needed a few minutes. A few minutes to regain my strength. But it was impossible to know whether I had a few minutes. Too risky. I focused, and began to change. I shrank first, the floor zooming up to meet me.

 

I stopped.

 

Why? Why wasn’t I morphing? I knew what a lizard looked like. I’d been that lizard fairly constantly for the past half day. My skin should be thickening, my bones changing, my eyes moving across my face. They weren’t. I was a few inches tall, shivering on the floor in a yellow leotard.

 

Human bodies aren’t designed to be so small. I was losing heat too quickly. A lizard can stand low temperatures, but I was going to freeze to death in short order if I couldn’t force my way through the rest of the morph.

 

The door opened. I shrank back against the wall and tried to look invisible as a Controller shut it firmly behind himself and pulled out a small communicator of some kind. Already my fingers were turning blue. Sounds made no sense; my eardrums were the wrong size to pick up useful ones, everything was just a high-pitched whine. _Lizard, lizard, lizard_. I suppose thinking of the sound was why all my effort funnelled into the ears, shrinking them to nothing, pulling the canals back. I felt the crunch of internal changes and normal lizard hearing slotted into place. I couldn’t feel my feet. It was so cold. I just needed to sleep a bit, recover my strength.

 

The Controller spoke into the communicator with a voice I recognised. It was the spy.

 

“Number six en route. We’re thirty miles North of the target. Are our people in?” A pause. “How long? Ma’am, I… yes, I understand. I can buy time, but the Visser’s people will walk if they have to.” Another pause. “Well, no, it’s a plane. There’s going to be evidence. We have enough explosives to bring it down, not destroy it entirely. If I don’t survive the crash, tell them… yes. Exactly. Good luck.”

 

He put the device away and reached into his boot, drawing Dracon beam. Even in my sleepy, cold-addled state, I knew this was going to be very, very bad news. It looked like I wasn’t the only one trying to stop this mission.

 

And this guy was willing to take some pretty extreme measures.


	6. Chapter 6

Now _there_ was the shot of adrenalin I needed.

 

I shot up to my full height, exploding upward behind the man, and wrapped my still-mostly-human hands around his. He gave a cry of alarm and turned to try to face me, but I couldn’t afford to to let him see me and wonder where a human girl could have come from; using every bit of strength in my trembling body, I forced the man’s head into the side of the wall. He staggered, but he was still conscious, trying to turn the Dracon beam on an assailant he couldn’t see. I slammed his head into the wall again; he twisted his wrist and pulled the trigger. The outer side of my right leg was gone, burned away; between the chill-numbed flesh and the intense heat of the beam, all I felt was a sharp, prolonged sting. My leg collapsed, and we were on the floor, and there was some kind of sucking sensation somewhere…

 

The wall. The Dracon had breached the hull of the plane.

 

There was banging outside the bathroom, Controllers coming to see what all the commotion was about. They forced the door open, and the man in my arms fired wildly through the doorway, forcing them back before they could see what was going on. The air was thin and chill and I was running on nothing but adrenalin and hope, still alive only due to the chaos.

 

Time to go.

 

The hole in the wall was almost big enough for me to crawl through. Almost. I started morphing as I scooted to the door and, miracle of miracles, the man I’d wrestled didn’t even look at me as he broke from my grasp and barrelled into the plane proper. He had no cause to wonder how a human girl could be turning into a cockroach before his eyes.

 

I launched myself out of the plane and prayed that cockroaches could indeed survive anything while above me, a plane wheeled out of control.

It takes a lot longer to fall from a plane than you would think.

 

I had a lot of time to contemplate my place in the world as I fell. By which I mean the place of a tiny bug thousands of feet in the air, a place it had no business being, and the fact that I had no idea where in the world I actually was. What I should do, I knew, was demorph and put on some wings, hope I could slow myself enough to turn a freefall into a glide and land safely somewhere below. But I didn’t know how many morphs I had in me. My failure to turn into the lizard in the bathroom was fresh in my mind. Adrenalin had pulled me through the cockroach morph, but would it give me one more? Would I even have the strength to demorph if I hit the ground alive?

 

Was I above ground? Would I land in the ocean? I imagined struggling to demorph in the middle of the ocean and then drowning, a helpless little human, too tired to put on wings or gills…

 

I fell. Cockroaches don’t see long distance all that well, so freefall was basically a big load of nothing all around me. I existed, somewhere, but it didn’t seem like anything else did. I tried to roll myself into a tiny, protective ball, but this isn’t something a cockroach can do. Cockroaches can fly, but I was pretty sure trying to do so at that point would just tear my wings off.

 

Eventually, I hit water. The force of the impact cracked my side open and I automatically focused on demorphing. Cockroaches, it turns out, can swim; I wriggled my way to the surface as I dragged the image of myself to the front of my mind. One more, Cassie. Just one more. _One more demorph and you can… can try to find something to float on, or… either way, you won’t need to do it again_.

 

I wouldn’t be able to do it again. Cassie the Animorph, drowning in a human body. Pathetic.

 

I put the thought aside and focused. Grew. Bones formed, my exoskeleton dissolved. It took a long time. It wasn’t pretty. My hair crawled into place, my fingernails hardened. I didn’t have the focus for the morphing outfit or the scraps of paper and money and soforth I carried in it. Morphing those things had always been a step above what the technology was supposed to do. But human would have to be good enough. I opened my eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath.

 

I wasn’t in the ocean. I was kneeling in about six inches of muddy water. Not far ahead of me was a stretch of dry dirt, sloping gently upward, and not far along that was a boy, about my age, staring at me as if he’d just seen a cockroach turn into a human girl in front of his eyes.

 

I blushed and tried to cover myself. He unrolled a tarp and handed it to me, turning his head while I wrapped it around myself.

 

“I’m Yami,” he said, as if this was something he saw every day.

 

“Cassie,” I told him.

 

Yami was taller than me, but then again, most people are. He was quite thin, with too-long arms and legs, but what was on them was mostly wiry muscle. He wore a loose shirt and baggy shorts that even I would call unfashionable, with his feet bare. His frizzy dark hair reached just past his shoulders, and his skin was darker than mine. Aside from the tarp he’d given me, a pair of dirty sneakers sat amongst a jumble of small trap nets of some design I didn’t recognise, a bloody knife, and a bucket of scrap meat. He pointed up the hill.

 

“My house is up there,” he said. “You look like you could use a good feed. Come on.” He shouldered the whole mess of gear and started marching up the hill. I followed.

 

“So,” I said to the awkward silence at large. “What were you doing down there when I… interrupted you?”

 

“Nothing important. Setting yabbie nets.” He gestured at the nets he was carrying. “What were you doing when I interrupted you?”

 

“That’s… kind of a long story.”

 

Yami nodded. He didn’t ask any more questions. The house was actually very close, just hidden by the hill; a tin-roofed wooden building with a large water tank on one side. The door wasn’t locked. Yami dumped his yabbie gear under a shelter by the front door and waved me inside.

 

“There’s a shower down there,” he said, pointing down the hall. “Third door. Don’t take long, we don’t have very much water. I’ll get you some of Mum’s spare clothes.”

 

“Will… will she mind?”

 

Yami laughed. “Mind? When Grampa sees you he’ll be ready to give you the house.” He disappeared into a bedroom and emerged moments later with an armful of clothes and a towel. “Go on, I’ll put the kettle on.”

 

Mindful of what Yami had said about not having much water, I restricted myself to a quick rinse under the shower before buckling on the loose jeans and blouse that he’d found for me. I had to roll up the cuffs of the jeans; apparently Yami’s mother was taller than I was. I came out just as he was pouring hot water into two mugs.

 

“Milk and sugar?” he asked.

 

“Uh… yes, please.”

 

He added them and pushed a steaming cup of tea into my hands. I nodded my thanks and let him lead me to the table. Yami’s house wasn’t that much different from mine, really; big open spaces with large windows and old furniture. The kitchen was separated from the lounge room only by a bench, and the table set up in the corner of the lounge room delineated the dining area. A farm house. But it still felt strange; instead of the vet’s equipment usually scattered through our house, Yami had a lot of devices I couldn’t identify, like the net traps. I couldn’t quite identify his accent, but it definitely wasn’t American. It sounded like a sort of rough drawl.

 

“Yami,” I said, “where am I?”

 

“You’re a ways North of Mount Edgar, mate.”

 

That meant nothing to me. “What country?”

 

He blinked. “Is that a trick question?”

 

“How could it be a trick question?” I scanned the room. My eyes rested on a photo on the wall; a young woman with a baby in her arms and a tall, bearded man behind her. Yami’s family? In the background was an animal I’d seen a few times at the Gardens. A kangaroo. I realised that I did vaguely know the accent. “Am I in Australia?”

 

“Sure are.” He frowned at my falling face. “This isn’t where you’re meant to be? You’re from America, right?”

 

I nodded.

 

“How the bloody hell does anyone get that lost?!”

 

“Like I said. Long story.” I sipped the tea. It was very sweet. I wondered just how much sugar Yami had put in it. “You know, you’re pretty calm for someone who saw… what happened.”

 

Yami shrugged. “What else am I gonna do?”

 

I decided to stop looking the gift horse in the mouth lest it bite me. “Look, I have to go. Thanks for your help, but I have to find something.” Somehow. I stood up and swayed on my feet.

 

“You got to sleep,” Yami insisted. “You’re knackered. Come on.” He took my elbow and firmly lead me down the hall into a bedroom. I instantly recognised it as a teenage boy’s bedroom; posters for some sport I didn’t recognise covered the walls, and dirty shorts and shirts in Yami’s size were piled up in one corner. He steered me onto a sunken bed. “Whatever it is can wait,” he said. “I’ll talk to my family when they get back. We might be able to help.”

 

I wanted to argue, but I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.


	7. Chapter 7

I woke up with the sunrise.

 

People were already moving around in the kitchen. I steeled myself, tried and failed to put together some sort of story for why I was there, and headed out to meet the family.

 

Yami was asleep on the couch under a blanket, snoring. I realised, guiltily, that I’d taken his bed for the night. I instantly recognised the other two people in the room as older versions of those in the photograph. The woman, who I assumed to be Yami’s mother, was frying eggs. Her dark hair was pulled back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, much like Mom did for work. She wore no jewellery except a bulky watch, and a small radio was clipped onto her leather belt. She looked over as I entered the room, and smiled.

 

“You must be Cassie, then,” she said. “Some in, sit down. You like eggs?”

 

I nodded dumbly. “Uh… hi. Sorry to, uh, drop in...”

 

“No trouble, no trouble. Did you come from the plane crash? Yami said you weren’t hurt, but I really think we should take a look at you, if you don’t mind.”

 

“Don’t mind my daughter,” the old man said. “She’s all impatience and no manners. You know how the young’uns are.”

 

Yami’s mother apparently didn’t think this was worth more response than an eyeroll. She slid the fried eggs onto a plate with toast and put it on the table, waving me over. “I’m Debbie, by the way. The grump is Maruntu. Milk and sugar in your tea?” she asked.

 

“Thanks,” I said weakly, still trying to come to grips with how this family in the middle of nowhere was just taking my presence in stride. I latched onto the important point in the conversation. “You saw the plane crash?”

 

Debbie sucked air around her teeth and cracked a couple more eggs into the pan. “Saw it is right. It took down the radio tower. We were out there half the night looking for survivors, but strangest thing, there’s barely any trace of anyone aboard.” She glanced sidelong at me. “Except you, of course.”

 

“Cassie never said she came from the plane,” Maruntu said, raising a snow-white eyebrow. He was more solidly build than Debbie or Yami, with a round belly under his high-waisted jeans. His completely white hair reached past his shoulders, somewhat longer than his trimmed beard. His black eyes were almost invisible in the deep cracks that stretched from them over his whole face. He held a long pipe in his yellowed teeth and grinned at his daughter. “You heard what Yami said.”

 

“Yes, I heard what Yami said,” Debbie said patiently. “You want these yolks solid?”

 

“You know me better than that.”

 

Debbie glanced at me. “Don’t mind my men,” she said. “They think they’re funny.” She slid the eggs onto another plate and dropped it in front of the old man, then went to prod her son awake. “Yami. Up now if you want breakfast.”

 

Yami groaned, pushed her away and rolled over, apparently forgetting that he was on a couch. He hit the floor with a heavy thump and an “ow”.

 

“Serves you right,” Debbie said. “Now get dressed.” She looked back to me. “I’m sure that people will be here to investigate that crash soon enough and pick up any survivors. We don’t get many planes out here.”

 

“We shouldn’t get any planes like that out here,” Maruntu grumbled. Debbie ignored him.

 

“Anyway, I’m sure they’ll be here very soon. You can stay with us until then.”

 

I bit my lip. Would the yeerks have taken the emergency trackers and stuff out of the plane? Maybe. “What if they don’t? Do you guys have a phone I can borrow?”

 

“There’s the radios,” Yami said, “but the crash took the tower down.”

 

“Get dressed,” his mother told him and he trooped out of the room. “The tower will take some time to fix, but if worst comes to worst, the postie comes by on Wednesday. You can grab a lift with him into town.”

 

“Postie?”

 

“With the post. The mail.”

 

“Right.” I sipped at the tea. “Thanks for everything.”

 

Debbie waved a hand. “Eat up. I’ll get the first aid kit and see if anything needs disinfecting. I’m guessing nothing’s broken or you would’ve said so by now.”

 

I nodded. “I’m fine. Completely fine.”

 

“After a plane crash?” She raised an eyebrow. “I think we should probably check.”

 

Maruntu snorted. “You really reckon – ”

 

“Oh, that’s enough out of you.” Debbie swatted him lightly on the shoulder and headed into the hall.

 

Maruntu grinned at me. “Don’t mind my girl. She gets like this when her head’s all full of university.”

 

“She’s at a university?”

 

He nodded. “Cultural studies. She’s observing significant cultural sites in the area and how their layout affects the stories.” Despite his teasing, there was pride in his voice. “When she gets all anthropologist, everything has to have the first explanation, see? Plane crash, strange girl walking around… must be from the plane crash. Never mind that she comes up without a stitch of clothing or a scratch on her. Never mind that it must’ve been a long fall, to be so far from the plane, and never mind Yami.” His eyes sparkled.

 

“What did Yami tell you?” I asked, shakily.

 

Maruntu drew on his pipe for several long, thoughtful seconds. Eventually he said, “My boy’s got a gift, you know. Debbie raised him right. He’s got her brain, he’ll get his own education someday, but he’s got eyes, too. He sees what happens, and then he figures out what it means, not the other way round like a lot of people. And if he can’t figure it oit, he still remembers what happens. Always has.” He glanced sidelong at me. “He knows the old stories, but he knows better to confuse what he sees with what he already knows. Debbie thinks maybe he sees things. I don’t.”

 

“What do you mean, old stories?”

 

“Dreamtime. History. All that. Each nation out here has its own stories, you know; Debbie likes to track them, see how they move between people. But they all got a few things in common, a few things that are important everywhere you go in Australia. One thing they all have, every single nation, is the water.”

 

I swallowed. “What do you mean, the water?”

 

“Big change – not piddly things like mountains and trenches and that, but real big change – it comes from the same place. Changing spirits, rainbow spirits.” He gave me another sly sidelong glance. “Water spirits, every time. So when we feel big changes coming and _jamuji_ tells me he sees a girl spring from the life of the only water we have around here this time of year, I listen.”

 

I looked away. “You think I’m a water spirit?”

 

He laughed. “I don’t know much, but I wouldn’t expect a water spirit to take on the form of an American teenager.” He patted my arm companionably. “I think you need help and we need help, and I think you’re here because something big is changing everything. That’s all I know. Debbie’s the one for askin’ questions, not me. You’re not the first weird thing we’ve seen about here these days and I don’t think you’re gunna be the last.”

 

I sighed. “I don’t know much either,” I said. “But I expect you’re right about that.”


	8. Chapter 8

I still had a mission.

 

It was pretty clear that Yami’s family weren’t Controllers. If they were, I’d already be dead, and besides, how would they feed every three days? We were, as far as I could tell, in the middle of nowhere. I was safe, for now.

 

But it was equally clear that whatever needed doing hadn’t been done. The traitor Controller’s last conversation had made it clear that he was attacking the plan to delay it; whatever group he was working for were making a bid for the prize, too. There might be survivors from the crash continuing their journey, and if there weren’t, there was still the second group on the way. I had to find it before they got there, and… do something.

 

I only had one clue; when I’d attacked the spy on the plane, we’d been thirty miles North of the target. It wasn’t much. How far had the plane moved before I’d bailed? Had we been pulled off-course in the meantime? How straight did a cockroach fall – were there wind currents or whatever that would’ve blown me off-course?

 

How did a cockroach, falling from the sky, manage to land in a tiny body of water right in front of one of the only people around for miles? I put that one aside for when I was safely home with my notebooks. It made me uncomfortable to think about. Normally I wouldn’t allow myself to use that kind of excuse, but I had more immediate concerns to think on.

 

“I have to see the plane crash,” I told Debbie after breakfast.

 

She nodded. “Yami will take you.”

 

Yami looked up from his toast in surprise. “I will?”

 

“There’s no point in doing any school work until the radio tower is fixed, it there?” She shrugged. “Stay out of the tent though. I mean it. No kidding; leave the tent alone.”

 

Yami’s face broke into a delighted grin. “Stay out of the tent. Got it.”

 

“Cassie, you can borrow some of my boots,” Debbie continued. “They’re probably going to be too big. Sorry.”

 

“Thanks,” I said. I wished I had something to offer these people other than trouble.

 

“Do I get the day off work, too?” Maruntu asked with mock eagerness in his voice.

 

“You barely work now,” Debbie pointed out.

 

“Um,” I said, “sorry, but do you guys have a map I can look at as well? I need to find… something.”

 

Debbie nodded. “We have an atlas somewhere. I’ll find it for you by the time you get back.”

 

“Thanks,” I said again.

 

Yami shoved the last of his toast in his face and wiped the crumbs from his mouth with one hand. “Come on, Cassie, let’s – ”

 

“Helmets,” Debbie called as Yami pulled me out the door.

 

“Come on Mum, it’s not even that – ”

 

“Helmet.”

 

“Fine.”

 

I understood her insistence on helmets when Yami took me around the back of the house to two small vehicles, under tarps. He pulled one off. It looked a bit like a large, chunky ride-on mower.

 

“We’ll take the four-wheelers,” he said. “It’s too far to walk.”

 

“I, uh, don’t know how to drive one of those,” I said, backing away.

 

“S’okay, you can ride on mine.” He handed me a helmet and buckled his own on as he slipped onto the bike. “Come on.”

 

I clambered awkwardly onto the bike behind him and held his shoulders gently. He took my hands and linked them around his waist. “You’ll fall off like that.”

 

And we were off.

 

I supposed that the bike couldn’t have been moving as fast as a car, but without any roof or sides, it sure felt faster. Fortunately, as an Animorph, this held no fear for me. I’d zoomed along the ground clearing many times my own body length per second with my chin almost touching the pebbles. I’d turned a freefall into a glide and dodged my way through a forest at top speed, one feather-twitch from sudden, messy death. An open vehicle? No problem.

 

The area around us was a series of rolling hills covered in dry, spindly grass. We quickly passed the water hole I’d demorphed in – a foot or two of murky water lurking sadly at the bottom of an artificially round hole – and zoomed on. The view was broken up by occasional fences, little more than a few strands of wire stretched between dry wooden posts and here and there I saw long, artificially straight stretches of trees. I couldn’t help but notice that the gates in the fences were all open; we zoomed through without trouble. I leaned forward to talk into Yami’s ear.

 

“What are the fences for?” I asked. “Why is it all open?”

 

“It’s a farm,” he shouted back. “It’s all shut up because of the draught. Farmer sold off everything and left. Not enough water for the animals, no money to dig new bores. Mom pulled us out here to do research for her thesis.”

 

“So the farm’s just… dead? Just like that?” I myself lived on a farm that wasn’t being, well, farmed, but that was just because we weren’t interested in having one.

 

“Someday the rains’ll come back,” Yami called back, “and someone else will farm something here, probably. We’re a bit too close to the coast to be eaten by the desert. I think. Probably.”

 

Before I could reply, Yami pointed ahead, and I saw it – the remains of the radio tower. The entire top half had been knocked off. As we got closer, I could see where it had torn completely free from the base and left huge, long gouges in the ground as it tumbled down the hill to rest in a crooked mess of bent metal at the bottom. It wasn’t the only thing; not far away, I could see where long trenches had been roughly torn up by another mass skimming along its surface. Wordlessly, Yami turned the four-wheeler to follow them.

 

The bottom half of the plane was lying upside down, large holes burned in its sides. There were no wings. I had no idea where the front half was. Not far off the wreckage was a hastily constructed tent, a large tarp pulled over steel poles, about halfway up a hill. Even from a distance, it looked stable and professional. The debris on the ground suggested that heavy things had been dragged to and from the tent recently.

 

Yami parked the four-wheeler at the top of the hill. I swallowed my nervousness and dismounted. There might be clues – old notes, a dropped communicator, anything – and if there were, I had to find them.

 

The plane was empty.

 

I found the wreckage that had been the bathroom and counted ruined, torn seats forward, until I found the seat with the handbag I’d hidden in. Nothing was there but some strange burn marks and a splattering of blood. No bags, no fallen papers, not even a dropped tube of lipstick. The overhead compartments, the ones that still existed, were also empty.

 

“She would’ve moved… everything… to the tent,” Yami said shakily beside me. I eyed the burn marks. I knew those marks. I doubted that there would have been much left to move.

 

I headed for the tent. Yami grabbed my arm. “She said not to go in!” he insisted.

 

“Then don’t go in,” I told him. I entered.

 

The tent wasn’t big, and there wasn’t much inside but a bunch of neatly laid out bundles wrapped in tarps. So this was why Debbie didn’t want her son to see inside the tent. From the size alone, I knew that they were, but I had to be sure. Remembering exactly how they were wrapped, I carefully unfolded the edge of one.

 

A severed arm fell out, slapped wetly against me, and fell to the ground.

 

I gagged. Already, in the heat, the smell was awful. I checked to see if my borrowed clothes had been marked by blood (apparently not) and quickly pushed the arm back in. Gritting my teeth, willing myself not to throw up, I uncovered the face.

 

There wasn’t one. Someone had burned a hole right through the body’s head. I could see the tarp on the other side.

 

Blinking back tears, I wrapped it up again, and checked a couple of others. Same thing – other injuries aside, they were all missing most of their heads. I hurried out of the tent.

 

“Don’t go in there,” I gasped.

 

Yami nodded. “I can smell it from here. You okay?”

 

I nodded. I’d seen enough. There wasn’t a scrap of anything yeerkish left on the plane; not a Dracon beam, not a scrap of paper, not even the remains of a yeerk. Somebody had taken a Dracon beam and seen to that. But in their fervour, they hadn’t bothered to do anything about the bodies. They must have been left there, in the plane, for Debbie and Maruntu to find in an otherwise clean scene, the identity of the hosts and the corpses of their slavers neatly removed with Dracon fire…

 

I’d seen a lot of death, both before and after being an Animorph. Dead bodies were sort of an occupational hazard. But to be left carelessly behind to rot while everything else was cleaned up, as if they were the least important thing on the plane? That made me sick.

 

It also meant that, somewhere, the Controller who had cleaned the scene was out there. Out there with answers I needed.

 

I’d barely been out of bed for an hour, and already I was tired.

 

“Yami,” I said, “you should go back home. There’s something I have to do.”

 

He shook his head. “I’m supposed to stick with you.”

 

I rubbed my temples. “You can’t help with this,” I said. “There’s someone out there, who walked away from this, somehow. I have to find them before it’s too late.”

 

“They’ll be injured,” he said. “I’ll get Mum. Do you know where they went?”

 

“No, they...” I stopped myself. They would need first aid, wouldn’t they? The human host would have to be injured, and the yeerk… well, I doubted that we were within two days of a yeerk pool. They’d be desperate, panicked. The human, at least, we could probably save, and I had to at least try to find a way to help the yeerk.

 

“They were healthy enough to walk,” I said. “It’ll be faster to go out ourselves and bring them back on the four-wheeler. I’ll track. Turn around, I have to do something, and just… don’t freak out, okay?” I was already unbuckling my jeans. Yami turned away while I got undressed and focused on the wolf inside me. Fur grew. Bones moved. Soon, I was on four paws.

 

<Okay,> I said, <you can look now.>

 

Yami jumped and flinched away. I’d forgotten how disconcerting thought-speak could be the first time. He turned and stared. “Can you turn into anything?” he asked.

 

<No. I have a list somewhere of things I can turn into. It’s not important.> I put my nose to the ground – blood, fear, rot. Fuel and fire. Yami bundled up the clothes I’d left behind and stuck them on the back of his four-wheeler. I moved away from the crash and did a quick circle, looking for human scents.

 

Yami and me, coming in with the acrid smell of burning petrol. I kept moving. Two more, a male and a female, both vaguely like Yami, stressed and afraid but not injured. I ignored those, too. Further on… yes. Blood, too little to see. Fear. Burning. Urine. That was probably the one. I took off at a trot; behind me, Yami started the bike and began to follow.

 

<Keep time for me,> I told him. <Let me know if we’re out here for longer than an hour.>

 

The smell of blood grew steadily stronger as we moved, until our quarry was leaving a visible trail. Spots dotted the dry grass regularly; running down an injured leg, perhaps. Yami caught up as I inspected an area of broken grass where the man had stopped for quite a while. The smell of burning was strong there, and from then on, the blood trail was gone, its smell replaced mostly with that of burnt flesh.

 

According to Yami, we’d been tracking for about fifty minutes before we found the body.

 

He was lying haphazardly at the bottom of a hill, a trail of broken grass and blood suggesting he must have fallen. Scraps of clothing that wasn’t his had been used to bandage various wounds. There was a large burn mark up his right leg; the flesh was cauterised. The body was fresh, but the sweet smell of infection lingered in several cuts. The smell of something else, something smokey and alien, surrounded his head. I demorphed and dressed to check the body properly.

 

With human eyes, I immediately recognised the man I’d wrestled in the bathroom. His hands were clutched tightly around a Dracon beam. They hadn’t even stiffened yet. I carefully pulled if from his grip; it felt clumsy and impossible in my hands. How could anybody aim or fire such a thing?

 

Easily, I knew. They were designed to be easy to use. Ax had no trouble with them. Karen’s tiny hands had used one designed for a hork-bajir pretty easily. I’d seen Tobias fire one with his talons once, and it hadn’t thrown his aim off too much. But it felt so big, so clumsy, like a badly made water pistol.

 

I’d seen enough Dracon beams to be familiar with how they worked. I turned the power all the way down and stuck it in my belt. I searched the body for anything else. No wallet, no keys, not even any spare change or old mints; just the gun. Something glinted in the grass not too far away. I picked it up. The communicator he’d used to talk to his allies. I pocketed that, too.

 

I looked up. Yami was staring at me.

 

“We should… I don’t know… do something for him?” I bit my lip. “Tell your mom where he is, at least. She can… you know.”

 

Yami nodded silently.

 

“I did ask you not to, you know, freak out.”

 

He nodded again. He handed me my helmet and waved me up onto the bike. I stayed where I was.

 

“I owe you an explanation, don’t I?” I said.

 

“Who was he?”

 

“I don’t know. A spy of some kind.”

 

“What was that gun? I never seen a gun like that.”

 

I hesitated. Made a decision. What the hell, they’d already seen too much anyway. “Back at the house,” I said. “I only want to have to explain all this once.”


	9. Chapter 9

“They’re called yeerks,” I explained. The four of us were crouched over the body, which had been laid out behind the house. Most of it was covered by a tarp, concealing the more horrific injuries from view, but the man’s face was visible. I took his jaw in my fingers and gently tilted the head sideways to show them the dry, bulbous mass emerging from his ear. “They crawl in and out that way,” I explained. “Past the eardrum. They make a tiny pinhole and burrow into the brain. Then they take over. They can read every thought, every emotion, every memory… and they take control of your body. They use that information to pass as the human they’re controlling, so that nobody suspects anything.”

 

Maruntu, Debbie, and Yami stared.

 

“Why?” Debbie asked.

 

“They’re trying to expand their empire,” I explained. “Trying to colonise the stars. There’s a war going on, and they’re grabbing as many planets… well, as many hosts… as they can. They’re blind and helpless in their normal state, so this is how they move around.” I shrugged. “There are a lot of us, we eat pretty much anything and heal well, and we’re reasonably intelligent without being technologically advanced enough to fight them. We’re an obvious target.”

 

“But you do fight them,” Yami said. He glanced at the Dracon beam lying next to the covered body.

 

I nodded. “My friends and I found a way. We happened to be in the right place at the right time when something fell from the sky.” I smiled. “A spaceship in this case, not an airplane. An alien War-Prince gave us the information we needed, and… and the power. Well, a power. It’s not enough, really, but we have to try.”

 

“That’s why you can do the things you can do?”

 

I nodded.

 

“Show me.” Debbie’s voice was guarded. I didn’t blame her. She didn’t want Yami there at all; she’d only allowed him on the logic that he’d already seen the body. She had no real reason to trust me. But I could see that she wanted to know what was going on. She wanted to know why a plane had fallen from the sky somewhere it wasn’t meant to be, cut off her family’s communication with the outside world, and dumped a mystery into her lap.

 

I stood up and stood back. Three pairs of eyes watched me. Yami’s, excited. Debbie’s, guarded. Maruntu’s, waiting. I spread my arms. This had to look good.

 

Feathered patterns started at my fingertips and wove their way up my arms, like tattoos being drawn in real time by a very fast invisible artist. They itched under my clothes as they crawled over my body, down my torso, up my neck. My hair was sucked into my head as the feather patterns took their place, tiny on the face, longer down the back of my head, longest on my bare arms. I closed my eyes, felt them change size and colour, and opened them to the magenta world of the osprey. I brought my arms down and up once, sharply, as the feathers sprang forth from my skin, then let my arms change until I was a winged, feathered, bird-eyed human. I shrank, borrowed clothes piling around me, letting the rest of my body change as I did so. The talons I left for last, so I wouldn’t tear up Debbie’s clothes as I walked forward. I looked at the three, cocking my head.

 

“Alright then,” Debbie said.

 

“This helps you fight?” Maruntu asked.

 

<We can scout. Spy. Grow big and fight, when we have to. We can learn a lot this way and use that information. Most importantly, when we morph, we heal. We can survive a lot.>

 

All three flinched at the voice in their head.

 

“Like falling from an airplane,” Yami said.

 

<Yes.>

 

“And how do you know we’re not these… yeerks?” Maruntu asked.

 

<If you were, I would be dead already. Besides, yeerks can’t stay in a head all the time. Every three days, they have to feed in a giant pool. The pools aren’t easy to build. It wouldn’t make sense to have one out here, with just you three. You’re probably safe for a good long while out here.>

 

The three exchanged a glance.

 

“Then why did they come out here?” Debbie asked.

 

<I don’t know. They’re after… something. I have to find it before they do. The crash bought some time, but more are coming. That’s why I wanted to borrow a map. I need to find a point thirty miles South of where the plane started having difficulty… somehow.>

 

“It’s East,” Maruntu said. “What you’re looking for.”

 

It was my turn to stare. Ospreys, being predatory birds, are very good at staring.

 

“I said before, you aren’t the first strange thing we’ve seen here recently. Something else fell from the sky a few days ago. It landed too far away to be worth going out and investigating.”

 

Debbie nodded. “Some kind of meteor, we thought. Some surveyers went out but couldn’t find anything.”

 

“Which means your aliens might have trouble, too,” Maruntu said. “It’s all scrub out there.” He drew on his pipe. “Can we help?”

 

<Not really. If you point out where it went down, I can head out there and… get this done.>

 

Yami pointed East. “Out that way, about… how far you think it was?”

 

“Thirty k’s, maybe?” Debbie suggested.

 

“Twenty-five,” Maruntu said.

 

“There is absolutely no way you could tell a five k difference in something falling from the sky at night,” Debbie said, crossing her arms.

 

“You want a wager?”

 

<What’s a k?> I asked.

 

“Kilometer,” Yami said. “Sorry, I forgot you were American. It’s about...” he glanced at his mom. “How many miles in a kilometer?”

 

“Two? Two and a half?” She shrugged.

 

<I’ll just head East until I see something,> I said.

 

Maruntu nodded. “There’s bush out that way. Landed in there, I think.”

 

<That’ll make it easy, then.> I flapped hard for lift, struggling to gain enough altitude to rest on a thermal. Ospreys don’t do all that well on the ground.

 

They also tend to look out of place in the dry Australian scrub, being water birds, but I figured that the chances of running into any Controllers, let alone ones who were bird experts, were slim. I might not have time to find an Australian bird morph. I headed East. Dry, open grassland rolled out, occasionally dotted by neat artificial waterholes like the one I’d fallen into. Most of them were dry. Eventually it gave way to dense trees. I landed, refreshed my morph, and started my search, moving in wide sweeps over the bushland. The trees were strange; very few of them had the sorts of wide, flat leaves I was used to. Most of them had small, shiny leaves or little needles. The flowers were little coloured brushes, like balls of yellow and pink cotton candy with colourful, chattering birds darting among them. They looked a bit like parrots. I kept my eye out for long trails of broken or burned trees, indicating a crash site.

 

There were none.

 

I refreshed my morph and widened my search. It was hard to tell how far away a falling object was, so I supposed it could be anywhere; East of the house was all I really had to go on. There was nothing for it but to keep going; I pulled as high as the osprey could comfortably fly and kept my eyes peeled for signs of the crash. It was an exhausting search; without anyone to keep time, I demorphed often. No way was I getting stuck in morph twice in a month. After several morphs, I finally had to admit defeat and headed back for the house to come up with another plan.

 

Ospreys have very good eyesight. I might not be able to find the crash site, but I definitely recognised the vehicle crouched in front of the house like a giant legless cockroach. Bug fighter.

 

Yeerks were here.


	10. Chapter 10

I cursed myself silently as I powered toward the house. Of course the yeerks were here! I’d assumed that we were safe because it’d be impractical to infest Yami’s family, and because they didn’t know I was there. Stupid of me. The spy had survived the crash and cleaned it up; he’d probably given them the crash location… told them about being attacked… and they’d come to the crash site, like me, to spread out and look for whatever had fallen from the sky.

 

And Maruntu and Debbie’s tent had been set up at the site, bodies neatly and respectfully removed and wrapped. Of course they’d investigate. Just because there was no point infesting them didn’t mean the yeerks wouldn’t cover their tracks. They’d have to make sure the family didn’t witness anything alien. Would they just kill them, or would they interrogate them first? Were they still alive? Could I rescue them?

 

I should’ve taken the time to find some local morphs after all. I was confident that Controllers wouldn’t notice me in the bush, but my osprey morph was way too familiar to them to go poking around a Controller-infested house. I kept high and circled the place, my osprey vision penetrating the glare on the windows as if the glass wasn’t even there. Three Controllers who I could see, all human. All carrying Dracon beams. There might be more out of sight of the windows. I could take on three humans, but not armed with Dracon beams, not without backup. Not without knowing if Yami, Debbie and Maruntu were in the line of fire. Where were they? Hiding? There weren’t many places to hide in the house. Already dead? Maybe. The yeerks might just be looking for any loose ends to tie up. I did another circuit of the house and saw something that, had I been human, would have made me cry with relief.

 

The four-wheelers were gone. They must have escaped.

 

To where, though? To town? I doubted that those little bikes had enough fuel for that. If they’d gone to the radio tower, they’d already be dead, but I hadn’t seen them on my way back… I gained altitude again and started sweeping the area. There, to the North – was that a trail of dust?

 

I followed it. Sure enough, the two four-wheelers were tearing across the paddock at a rather higher speed than I would have expected. On the back of Yami’s bike was Maruntu, still somehow managing to calmly smoke his pipe; behind Debbie was a large, twine-wrapped canvas bundle. As I watched, they turned their course right, to the East.

 

I dropped down on front of them where they’d be sure to see me. <Your house is full of yeerks,> I pointed out.

 

“We noticed,” Debbie called over the engines. “We thought it best not to hang around.” They stopped the bikes, and I landed on their bundle.

 

“You find it?” Yami asked.

 

<Not a thing. It’s all just trees out there, no sign of anything crashing at all.>

 

“Well then,” Maruntu said, cracking his knuckles. “I guess we’re going bushwalking. Time to search the old-fashioned way.”

 

Yami grinned in delight.

 

“Not you,” Maruntu said firmly. “Your mum’s taking you somewhere safe. But I know this bush like the back of my hand. We’ll find this.”

 

<Hang on,> I said, <this isn’t your fight. We don’t even know what we’re looking for. I’m not going to let you put yourself in danger on a scavenger hunt.>

 

Maruntu raised a bushy white eyebrow and leaned forward on the bike to stare at me. “If you lose this war, these aliens will be back, won’t they?”

 

<Not any time soon, I don’t think. This place is kind of remote. But… eventually. Yes.>

 

“Within my children and grandchildren’s lifetimes?”

 

<… Yes.>

 

“Then this is my fight.” He reached out and tapped me gently on the beak. “Don’t argue. We have some of the most argumentative birds in the world out here and I’ve never lost to a one of ‘em.”

 

<I can’t see it from the sky,> I pointed out. <You’re not going to see anything on the ground.>

 

“I got good eyes.”

 

<Not as good as an osprey’s.>

 

“Yeah? Does your osprey even know what the bush is supposed to look like?”

 

<… trees?>

 

Maruntu raised his other brow. “If you don’t know what it’s supposed to be like, how will you know if it isn’t normal?”

 

I thought of Tobias, not being fooled by Jenny and Erek’s perfect holograms in the forest. <… Good point.>

 

“Let’s get going then.”

 

Debbie sighed. “You can’t go out there by yourself. I’ll come.”

 

“I’ve been walking these lands by myself since before you were born, _kurntal_. If you come, who gun’ protect Yami?”

 

“Protect me how?” Yami asked. “Where can we go that’s safer from aliens than with Cassie?”

 

Maruntu and Debbie stared at him a moment, then exchanged a glance.

 

“… Okay,” Debbie said. “You can come, but only because you can hide in the bush. If we find anything even a little bit strange, you go right down. Okay? No arguments.”

 

“But what if – ”

 

“Right. Down.”

 

Yami nodded meekly.

 

“Okay,” Debbie muttered, reaching to start the four wheeler again. “Just a good old family bushwalk. It’s been awhile.”


	11. Chapter 11

We took the four-wheelers to the edge of the bush, and while I demorphed and dressed, the others piled brush to hide them.

 

“We’re two k’s too far North,” Maruntu said as he worked. “We’ll need to angle back as we walk. Yami, you remember how to keep distance and time?”

 

Yami rolled his eyes. “It hasn’t been _that_ long.”

 

“Well if you’re so sure of things then you should have time to help your mother divide the bundle,” he said. He glanced at me. “You go bushwalking much in America, Cassie?”

 

“A little bit of hiking,” I said. “Not much, but I did get lost in the forest recently.”

 

“How does someone who can turn into a bird get lost in the forest?”

 

“It’s a really long story.”

 

“Well stick with us and you’ll be fine. This country isn’t as dangerous as they say.”

 

“Oh, good.”

 

Debbie handed me a backpack. It wasn’t very heavy. I shouldered it. Yami put his on, while Debbie and Marunti hoisted twine-wrapped bundles over their shoulders. Debbie carried a shotgun, which she handled in what looked to my inexperienced eyes to be a very experienced manner. Maruntu held the Dracon beam somewhat more awkwardly. He checked that we all had water bottles and decent shoes before giving Yami a nod.

 

Yami took the lead, glancing at the sky and inspecting the trees briefly before heading out confidently into the trees. The rest of us followed several feet behind. The footsteps of the adults were almost silent as we moved among the strange, spindly trees. The forest smelled as strange as it looked, the air full of an oily dryness that our forest never had even in the middle of summer. The cries of the birds, too, were unfamiliar, their chatters and caws just a little bit different to what I was used to. One in particular had an alarm call that sounded just like mocking laughter.

 

“Kookaburra,” Yami called it, grinning. “Just wait until the morning. They love to laugh at the sunrise.”

 

Every now and then, somebody would spot some kind of strange bird or furry animal, point it out, and watch if for a little while. When I asked, Debbie explained that they were checking for unusual behaviour; an absence of animals, or animals behaving particularly agitated, might suggest that something strange had taken place recently, or that there were other people around.

 

“They’ll be stressed from our presence regardless,” she added, “but they see travellers every now and then. They’re more used to us. You can tell when whitefellahs have been through because the animals get far more agitated; they make a lot of mess and sound different.”

 

It was a long journey. When my feet started to hurt too much, I’d partly morph to heal them and keep going. I kept having to remind myself that I didn’t need to demorph every two hours; I was already in my body.

 

Yami kept us on a fairly straight path, occasionally curving around a dense patch of trees or difficult ground. The adults offered minor corrections whenever we got too far off course. As sunset approached, Maruntu called a halt.

 

“We should make camp before it gets dark,” he said. “I don’t want to light a fire out here. Yami, how about you see if you can scrounge some tucker while we set up?”

 

Yami nodded and headed off into the trees while Maruntu and Debbie untied their bundles and began tying tents from the canvas.

 

“You guys do this a lot, don’t you?” I asked.

 

“Whenever we can,” Maruntu said. “It’s important that the young’uns know how.”

 

“Normally we’d have more people,” Debbie added, tying a corner of the canvas to a tree.. “It’s not really good for Yami to be on his own with us like this. I still think we should’ve left him with his aunts.”

 

“It wouldn’t be good for you to be out here alone either,” Maruntu shrugged. “You would’ve been more alone than he is.”

 

“He wouldn’t be hiding from aliens right now.”

 

Maruntu grinned. “There is that.”

 

Debbie glanced at me. “That pack you’re carrying has food and water. I didn’t have time to make sandwiches, I’m afraid, but we’ll make do.”

 

The backpack contained bread, cheese, and some cold meat and vegetables. I was setting them out just as I heard a delighted yell from somewhere inside the trees. Moments later, Yami came back, cradling a long piece of bark with something white on it.

 

“You found something?” Debbie asked.

 

He put the bark down. “There’s not much out there,” he said, “but I found these.”

 

“Good find,” Maruntu said, poking at the mass. “They’re nice and fat, too.”

 

What Yami had found were giant grubs, like big white caterpillars, almost as long as my hand and thicker than my finger. I automatically shrank back. They looked, if anything, like tiny toothless taxxons, with their puffy white segments and flat yellow heads. They even had little clawed legs on the front half of their bodies. Six of them squirmed blindly on the piece of bark.

 

“Witchety grubs,” he explained to me with a grin. “Try one. They’re deadly.”

 

I shrank back further.

 

“She’s a whitefellah, Yami,” Debbie said with a sigh.

 

“I’m not white!” I snapped.

 

“Sorry. I meant an outsider. You’re not used to his slang. Witchety grubs are perfectly harmless.” As if to demonstrate, she grabbed one off the bark and popped it into her mouth, chewing with relish.

 

“You should have one,” Yami said solemnly. “You can’t come all the way to Australia and not try witchety grubs. It’s like going to Hawaii and not surfing.”

 

I considered explaining that I was giving vegetarianism a go these days, but it didn’t seem the time. Reluctantly, I reached out and picked one up off the bark, trying not to think of taxxons. Like Debbie had done, I dropped the whole thing in my mouth and bit down. It stopped wriggling very quickly.

 

It wasn’t bad. Below the fragile, crunchy exterior was soft, buttery flesh. I chewed thoughtfully.

 

“We’re supposed to say it tastes like chicken,” Yami said in a tone that suggested he thought that was rubbish.

 

“It tastes more like spider,” I said without thinking.

 

All three of them broke into laughter. Maruntu clapped me on the back. “We’ll save that slogan for the tourist board,” he chuckled. I graciously left the rest of the witchety grubs for the others and stuck to the non-meat parts of the packed lunch.

 

As the sky darkened, I considered continuing my search as an owl, but there didn’t seem to be any point – if we were going to find anything, it was already clear that I wouldn’t find it from the sky. Spending the night flying only to walk again the next day would just wear me out. So I lay down, closed my eyes, and did everything I could to sleep.


	12. Chapter 12

I was suffocating. The poison had gotten to me but I couldn’t demorph, not with all the Controllers behind me. A misshapen blob of human flesh and fly parts, I crawled for safety, while the kookaburra laughed at me in the background, his voice all-encompassing. Joy became mockery became cruelty, and it was the cold mental laughter of Visser Three as I clambered away, only for the hork-bajir to push my head back under the swirling chaos of the Yeerk Pool.

 

<I will let you drown, you know,> he told me, and I kicked, kicked free the bags of oatmeal and condemned Aftran’s siblings and cousins and friends and mentors to death.

 

I broke free as the hork-bajir screamed, their faces swelling with huge, greedy ticks, and ran, ran as fast as I could until I was ducking through abandoned buildings in a construction site full of aliens who wanted me dead. My lungs burned, sweat stung my eyes; I closed them and barrelled right into Jake.

 

I looked up into his shocked, betrayed face.

 

“You ran away again,” he said flatly.

 

I shook my head. “I couldn’t get off the plane. You would have died. I had to make you think I was off to get you off.”

 

“And then you ran away again. We thought you died in the forest. We thought you’d be a butterfly forever. Now we think you’re dead on the plane.” His hand reached up, ran up the side of my face. “When will you stop doing this to me?”

 

“I’m not trying to hurt you… I didn’t think...”

 

“You didn’t think,” he repeated sadly, and his caress became a grip; fingers curled in my hair and he was slamming my head against the table in the shack, Temrash’s cruel leer on his lips…

 

My eyes flew open. I was rigid, barely breathing, and it took a while to remember where I was. Tent. Australia. Right. At least I hadn’t woken up screaming.

 

I crawled out into a silver forest. The bush wasn’t thick enough to block the light of the full moon. Yami was sitting a little way away, cross-legged, wrists resting on his knees, staring contemplatively out into the trees. I joined him.

 

“Sorry,” I said.

 

He glanced at me. “Hmm?”

 

“About this yeerk thing. They shouldn’t be here.”

 

He shrugged. “They shouldn’t be your place either, right?”

 

“I guess not.”

 

He picked up a twig and dug idly at the ground. “Are you scared?”

 

I sighed. “Yeah.”

 

“You been doing this a long time.”

 

“I still get scared.” I glanced at him sidelong. “Your family will be fine, though. The yeerks scouted out your house because they thought you might know too much, but it’s not worth coming out here all the time. Once we find what we’re looking for and deal with it, they’ll leave.”

 

Yami nodded. He was staring at the moon. The silver light rounded his features, highlighting the edge of his nose and lips and the depth of his eyes against his dark skin. His shoulder-length hair was tangled; some had fallen forward over his face. I resisted the urge to push it back.

 

“Japara’s resting in his search, too,” he said dreamily. “I suppose we should use this time to sleep and gain our strength.”

 

“Who’s Japara?” I asked.

 

Yami pointed up at the moon. “In the time of the Dreaming, Japara was a strong hunter,” he told me in the singsong voice of somebody relating a story by rote. “He provided for his wife and his little son, searching far and wide of the best prey. He loved them very, very much and wanted the best for them. One day, he was out hunting when Parukapoli visited his wife. Parukapoli was very lazy, but clever with words; he told clever stories to gain peoples’ help. He came to Japara’s wife with a great tale, his cleverest and funniest yet, and she was fascinated. She listened and laughed for hours, and forgot to keep a close eye on her son.” Yami gave me a sad smile. “The boy, too young to understand the danger, had wandered to the river and fallen in. Japara’s wife heard his cry and immediately ran after him, but she was too late; by the time she’d pulled the baby from the water, he’d drowned.

 

“Japara returned home to find his grief-stricken wife cradling the body of his child, crying endlessly. She’s been there for hours and had almost no tears left to cry. He asked what had happened, and she confessed her lapse in attention and its terrible consequence. Overcome with anger and grief, Japara accused her of murdering his beloved child and killed her with his hunting weapons. Then he tracked down Parukapoli, started a fight, and killed him, too. Japara was a fantastic hunter, and neither his wife nor Parukapoli stood a chance against him.

 

“He returned to the rest of his tribe, body bleeding from the wounds Parukapoli had inflicted during their fight, heart bleeding for grief for his wife and child, and told everyone what had happened. They bandaged his wounds, but were extremely angry with him. ‘You have taken a tragic accident and made it worse,’ they scolded him. ‘Your wife did not mean to kill your child; she loved him with all of her heart. It was a mistake that you were not there, out hunting at that moment; that she was not there, distracted for a moment by a story; that Parukapoli happened to come by on that day. And in your grief and anger you have tripled this tragedy, and taken from us your dear wife, who never hurt anyone.’ Japara knew that they were right; that he had done a terrible thing, and he was very distressed over his poor family. He returned to the place where he had left his wife and child, but they were gone. Japara understood that kind spirits had taken them to live and grow in a better place, free from his anger; he begged the forgiveness of the spirits and said he wanted nothing more but to erase the mistake and be with his wife and son again.

 

“The spirits heard his words and knew that he was sincere. They assured him that his wife and son were safe with them in the sky world. They told him that if he truly spoke his heart, then he too could come to the sky world, but as punishment for his actions and so that he would always remember the consequences of rash action, they would not bring him to his family; he would have to search the entire sky for them and hope that they wanted to be found.

 

“They say that the moon is the reflection of Japara’s campfire, moving about as he moves around the sky world. Some say that he’s still searching for his family out there. Others say that he found them, and they reconciled, and they now explore the sky world together.”

 

“That’s… what, one of your ancestor’s creation myths?”

 

He shook his head. “That story was told to me by my… uh, my aunt’s husband. Our story is different. But it fits this situation better.” He started scratching the ground with the stick again. “Different people have slightly different memories of the Dreamtime. Don’t tell my grandfather that I told you that version and not our version, though.”

 

“Are you not supposed to?”

 

He shrugged. “Grandpa is very protective of the old ways. We have so little of our history left, he might worry that I don’t remember the story properly. He takes teaching us very seriously. Many generations ago it wouldn’t matter very much, because if he didn’t teach us properly, there would be somebody else to do it, but there are so few of us left these days. Some of the people have been cut off from their history altogether, and once it’s lost, it can’t come back. We’re too weak, I think, to fight aliens on top of everything else.”

 

“You won’t have to,” I promised.

 

“I hope you’re right. But we’ll prepare anyway.”

 

“Do you have a lot of these creation stories?” I asked hesitantly. I’d never really met people with proper creation myths before, unless you counted mainstream religions like Christianity. They seemed like something that ancient, long-dead people did.

 

“There are Dreamtime stories for most things. Different landmarks, different animals, different events. The Dreaming is very important; Grandpa makes sure we all know as much of it as possible.”

 

“Important?” I frowned. I could see how such things were culturally interesting, and that it was always a tragedy to lose a piece of any culture, but creation myths weren’t something that I’d consider particularly important unless Yami actually believed that the moon was really a campfire light, which I doubted. I didn’t say anything – it would be rude to do so, I figured, but Yami caught sight of my expression and grinned.

 

“The Dreaming is the law,” he explained. “The events of the stories shape the world, and to know them is to know the law; the proper rites and behaviours and morals that have kept us alive for seventy thousand years. Outsiders don’t normally get it; they’re taught to see people and the world as separate things, and taught to see what we do and what we are as separate things. But they’re not. History, identity and behaviour are all coded in the Dreaming, and to walk in the land is to be forced to be a part of those things.”

 

I thought about Maruntu, telling me how change always came from the water, like I had, and swallowed.

 

“Your turn,” he said. “Tell me one of your stories.”

 

“I don’t… really have any,” I admitted. What did I have? I wasn’t Christian, so I didn’t have their myths. Apocryphal stories about cherry trees and honest Presidents probably wouldn’t mean much to him.

 

Yami looked away. “Sorry. Forgive me. I forgot for a moment.”

 

“What? It’s okay. What’s wrong?”

 

“Nothing, forget it. I… I forgot what they did to you.”

 

“What who did to me? The yeerks?”

 

“No, the whitefellahs. I’ve been sitting here going on about how they tried to take our history and we’re losing it and being self-pitying… I forgot about yours.” He turned further away, so I couldn’t see any of his face. “Please, forgive me and forget it.”

 

“I don’t… it’s not like that, Yami. I’m American.”

 

“And I’m Australian,” he said. “But it’s not all I have to be. You’re everything you are, and they try to make you choose. They did it with us, too. Stole the kids, hit them for speaking the languages, didn’t let them go through the Law. They tell you that you can’t be everything, that you have to choose, then cut off all of your choices except the one they want and tell you you decided on that one. Then they make you feel like being anything outside that choice is betraying who you are, like our histories somehow make us less Australian or American if we remember them. They couldn’t take all of ours because there’s nowhere on this continent that you can put someone where they can’t walk home, but with yours...” his voice caught. He’d turned his head enough that I could see his cheek. Tears were glinting on it in the moonlight. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to talk about it. It’s so rude of me.”

 

“It’s okay,” I said quietly. But I was glad that he seemed ready to drop the subject. It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about with a near-stranger in a new country when we were both supposed to be sleeping. But then… who could I talk about such things with? I couldn’t have real conversations with my parents any more. Every exchange had to be carefully checked for any hint about the yeerks. And the Animorphs… were not past-oriented people. I tried to imagine sitting out in the quiet moonlight with Jake, talking about history. I tried to imagine the light filtering through his hair instead of Yami’s, glinting in his eye as he watched the moon. I couldn’t. Jake’s idea of history was recent, a narrow span of a few hundred years with a civil war and everything that had happened after. He didn’t seem to need anything longer than that. Besides, the conditions of our histories before and after that war were… awkwardly incongruous. Jake and Rachel had Jewish heritage, but it wasn’t the same thing. Yami’s history wasn’t the same thing, either.

 

Sitting under a bright moon in that strange bushland, I suddenly felt very, very alone.

 

“I’m going to try to get some rest,” Yami said after several seconds of silence. “I hate walking tired.” He reached out and gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze before standing up. “Don’t watch Japara’s fire too long,” he advised. “You’ll want to be able to keep up with him tomorrow, too.”

 

I watched the moon for a fair while after he was gone, thinking of the story of Japara. A hunter who acted in anger, took irreconcilable actions, and wandered looking for what he’d destroyed. I’d killed in this war, and would do so again. Some of it had been necessary, but some had just been expedient, or simply felt justified. If we did get through the war with any kind of peace, if I was truly sincere about my desire to make it without simply slaughtering the yeerks in a fit of righteous vengeance, how on Earth would I be able to justify anything I’d done with the person I was trying to be? Why would any enemy deal with, or even willingly surrender to, somebody with my history? They hated us, and not just because they thought we were andalites; they hated us for the things that we, personally, had done. How many yeerks like Aftran were out there, yeerks who had seen their loved ones die at our teeth and claws because they happened to be in the way? How many humans and taxxons and hork-bajir, Controllers or otherwise, had lost loved ones in those fights? How on Earth were we supposed to face any of them if, by some miracle, we did manage to make it through this war?

 

I knew what the other Animorphs would say. Marco would point out the rather obvious point that those worries were dependent on us actually making it through the war, and that that was so unlikely that pretty much anything we did to increase our chances of success was more important than any vague aftermath because the freedom of our entire species was at stake. Jake would offer vague platitudes, but internally, he’d agree with Marco. Rachel would question why I thought the yeerks really deserved any such mercy and consideration after everything they’d done, and while their hosts were probably largely innocent, point out that there were worse fates than dying for the freedom of your people. Ax would probably agree with her; he despised yeerks more than any of us. And Tobias would point out that it didn’t really matter what anyone else thought; we were fighting, we had to make hard decisions, and the only important thing was doing as much as we could to protect as many people as we could.

 

But somebody had to think of the best-case scenario. Somebody had to think of what came next. I just wished it didn’t always have to be me.


	13. Chapter 13

We woke with the sunrise and were walking soon after. The kookaburras were indeed more noisy in the morning. “You should hear them way out East, where they’re supposed to live,” Yami told me. He’d taken the lead again, at his mother’s request, and was leading us due East. I didn’t see how he could possibly know how to take us to the right spot without a map or navigational equipment when all we had to go on was the direction in which the object fell, but the others didn’t seem very worried about it.

 

They were right not to be. Midmorning, Maruntu stopped abruptly. “Deb, you smell that?”

 

Debbie smelled the air. “That’s not a campfire,” she said. “But it’s too faint to be a bushfire. This time of year, anything that burned that many things would take the whole bush. We haven’t had any lightning recently, right?”

 

Maruntu shook his head.

 

“Yami, Cassie, stay here.” The adults fanned out; both, I noticed, with hands in their guns.

 

Yami took my hand and pulled me down into the underbrush. “We wait,” he breathed quietly into my ear, “and see if it’s aliens.”

 

“And it if is?”

 

“Then we hide. Or run. You’re the alien person.”

 

I nodded and focused on the concept of a wolf. I might not need to morph yet, but there was no harm in being ready to start quickly. Just in case.

 

Less than five minutes later, Debbie called out that she’d found something. There was a rustle behind us; Maruntu walked past, following her voice. A couple of minutes later, another call.

 

“Cassie? What are we looking at?”

 

Yami and I followed. The adults were standing at the edge of a clear expanse cut through bush so thick I wasn’t able to see it until we were six feet away. The gouge out of the bush was at least a few city blocks wide. I couldn’t tell how long it was, because the spaceship wreckage was blocking my view.

 

It was a flying saucer. Round, smooth rim, sphere in the middle, smashed somethings that could’ve been lights – the saucer was far from complete, having lost a lot of parts in the landing, but there was no mistaking that this spaceship had once looked exactly like something out of a B movie. It must have left a huge gash in the bush in its path, something my osprey morph should have noticed easily. I glanced up.

 

Above the saucer was the fuzzy impression of thick leaves and branches, blurring the perfectly visible sky behind them. “Huh,” I said.

 

Debbie followed my gaze. “What is it?” She asked nervously.

 

“We’re seeing a hologram from the inside. I know it looks weird, but it’s nothing to worry about. This ship is hiding.” I stepped back into and out of the trees a couple of times to check before continuing, “but only from above. It must have recorded this area while crashing and then projected the hologram to hide. Why? What kind of species builds something like that into their ships? Why program that instead of concentrating on not crashing in the first place?”

 

“Why do you think it’s a program?” Debbie asked nervously. “Someone might be doing it from the inside.”

 

Live aliens. I hadn’t even considered that. Some Earth defender I was.

 

Maruntu, I noticed, was rubbing his nose. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

 

“Hit my face on somethin’,” he said.

 

I squinted. In the fuzzy light filtering through the hologram, I could just make out a faint wall, like very clean glass. I reached out to brush it with my fingers. It tingled a little. “Force field,” I said. I paced around a bit. “A dome around the ship, I assume. But look at the trees and things; a lot of debris is inside the force field. This thing wasn’t turned on until _after_ the ship crashed.”

 

“How do we get through it?” Yami asked.

 

“We don’t need to get through it,” Debbie told him. She glanced at me. “Do we?”

 

“You don’t. I do. I don’t know what the yeerks want with this. I can’t hide a whole ship from them. I need to try to find whatever’s important, and destroy it.”

 

“Will you know it when you see it?”

 

“Probably not.” I shrugged. “This job is hardly ever easy.”

 

“So we do need to get in,” Yami said. “How?”

 

Debbie pressed her lips together and glanced at Maruntu. Maruntu shrugged.

 

Force fields, force fields… what did I know about force fields? The chee used them, of course, to simulate skin and clothing and so forth – how did I penetrate those? I didn’t. The chee dropped them if they wanted me to get through them.

 

I’d encountered a big dome force field somewhere before, though, hadn’t I? _Think, Cassie, think_. Yeerk Pool… no, they used doors and cages, maybe force fields used too much power… yeerk mothership… no, they had some kind of moving metal… why were we captured and locked up so much that I had such a list of restraints, it was getting ridiculous…

 

The family gave me space to think. Yami picked up a stick and idly poked the force field with it. Nothing interesting happened.

 

Stick. Logging camp. The yeerk logging camp.

 

I immediately crouched down and started to feel about around the bottom of the force field.

 

“What are you looking for?” Yami asked, crouching beside me.

 

“Luck,” I said. “If this is a big sphere or something then we don’t have a hope of getting in, but some force fields cast a shadow if something’s in the way...” I dug my fingers into the soil, under some leaves, and shoved them forward, half-expecting them to slam hard on an underground part of the field. They didn’t. I lifted my hands, fingers through the field, turning my hands over in wonder as I did so.

 

Pain shot through my hands. I shrieked and pulled them out. My fingers were neatly burned where they’d pierced the field, like I was wearing rings of cracked and melted flesh. Maruntu snatched my hands, inspected them, and clicked his tongue.

 

“First aid kit, Deb?” he asked.

 

“Yami’s pack and yours,” she said. She pulled Maruntu’s bundle from his shoulder and started unwrapping it.

 

“No, no, it’s okay,” I said quickly. I quickly morphed them into Rachel’s hands and back. The family stared. I considered explaining, but it probably wasn’t worth the time.

 

I found a torn branch lying across the field and carefully passed a hand under it. Yep, the branch was casting a shadow. The forcefield didn’t seem to be burning the wood. So I supposed I’d have to morph and crawl under something – what did I have? I wasn’t going to use the termite again, or an ant. Skunk might be able to burrow – no, that’d take too long. Cockroach or lizard, then, and crawl along under a piece of wood. Yeah, that’d work.

 

I walked back around to the family. “Okay,” I said, “If you guys wait out here, I can – what are you doing?”

 

Maruntu, Debbie and Yami had unrolled Debbie and Maruntu’s rolls and spread the tarps on the ground next to the force field. They were digging at the ground under the field, carefully pushing the edge of the tarps under the soil.

 

“Making a door,” Yami explained. “Okay, Mum, it’s all the way under. The rest has to be done on the other side.”

 

“I’ll go,” she said.

 

“I’m smaller. It’s safer for me to do it,” Yami countered.

 

“Out of the question.”

 

“I’m smaller than Yami,” I volunteered. “And I can heal myself. I’ll go.”

 

Debbie exchanged a glance with Maruntu. “Okay. But be careful.”

 

The two adults held the sides of the tarp down while I slowly, carefully crawled under it. Yami, leaning on the force field, kept careful watch to make sure that the edge of the tarp stayed under the field as I crawled under it. I tried not to think about what it would feel like for the tarp to slip back while I was halfway under the field.

 

Slowly, carefully, I crept forward. It was dark and confined under the tarp. Despite the danger, I found myself calming down. This was just like my cocoon, a place to grow and develop in calm safety. I pushed the memory away – I had a job to do.

 

I crawled forward, and ahead of me, light; the end of the tarp had lifted from the ground in front of me, and I was almost through. Was it still on the other side of the force field? Yami hadn’t called any warning. I pushed my arms forward, into the light; they met no resistance. Carefully, I grabbed the end of the tarp and crawled forward, pulling the tarp with me so that much more of it would be on the inside of the force field and it would have no danger of slipping back while I was passing under it. I wriggled out the other end and stood up, brushing off my knees.

 

Applause, muted by the force field, erupted briefly behind me.

 

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get this sorted.” From my side, I pulled the tarp in further, while Maruntu and Debbie weighed down the corners on their end with fallen wood. I held my side while Yami shimmied under to join me, and we held our corners steady for the adults. The inside corners were weighed down – the last thing we wanted was for the tarp to move outside the forcefield and leave us trapped inside – and we turned our attention to the flying saucer.

 

It was a mess. Large burn marks littered the metal disk in long streaks. The smell of smoke was strong and strange; there was some woodsmoke in there, but most of it was the smell of burnt things I couldn’t recognise. I hoped it wasn’t too poisonous, for the family’s sake. A good quarter of the ship’s outer wall was missing, torn off in great big panels; I couldn’t see where they’d ended up. There was, of course, nothing moving inside the force field; it blocked the wind, and I didn’t want to think about what had happened to any animals trapped inside when it went up.

 

“Okay,” Maruntu said. “Deb, go with Cassie and find this thing that the aliens want. Yami, with me; we’ll look for any survivors of the crash and see if we can help. Then we follow if – IF – it is safe. You got those little hand radios from Christmas?”

 

Yami nodded.

 

“Give one to your mother.”

 

He did so.

 

“Alright. Good luck, girls.”

 

“Don’t do anything dangerous,” Debbie said quietly.

 

“Girl, you know that when I die it won’t be from aliens. Be safe.”

 

Debbie nodded, checked her shotgun, and looked to me.

 

“Right,” I said. I swallowed nervously. I wasn’t used to people looking at me like I knew what I was doing. Especially when I didn’t. “Right,” I said again. I looked at the ship. “I don’t recognise this design, except from movies and stuff. I guess we should just check it out.”

 

I lead the way through a gap in the wall and found myself in a small room. The door on the other end, locked open, lead into a long, bending corridor. It followed the shape of the outer wall. I wondered if it went all the way around the ship in a big circle.

 

I glanced around the room. Storage cupboards, mostly, and open shelves containing the wrecked remnants of all sorts of things I couldn’t identify. Any one of these – or any of the rest of the ship – could contain what I was looking for. I had no idea what I was looking for. Maybe just the ship itself. I opened a couple of cupboards. More… things… were inside. Some of them looked vaguely gun-shaped or camera-shaped, but being for aliens, they could be anything. There was so much variation in shapes and styles. A couple of the items were identifiably human. A handgun. A pair of dentures. An old poster for some Elvis movie, the bottom half with the title on it burned away.

 

I opened another cupboard. A corpse fell out. Behind me, Debbie made a little strangled noise in her throat. The body was badly burned, but I could immediately tell that it wasn’t human. A bulbous head, the remaining flesh grey and rubbery; long, spindly fingers, raised to protect the face. It was crouching, as if the little alien had tried to survive the crash by climbing into the cupboard and bracing itself. I wasn’t sure how to respectfully treat whatever alien this was, but I laid it out on the ground (the giant eyes were too burned out to tell if they were open or closed) and moved on into the corridor.

 

The corridor had clearly been immaculately clean before the crash, judging by the intact parts, but it was now filled with random debris and scorch marks. “Still,” I said, mostly to myself, “most of the ship is here. Maybe there are survivors further in.”

 

“The corridors are open,” Debbie pointed out. She’d found a place where a corridor branched from our circular one, heading into the ship. It was much narrower than the circular corridor, barely wider than our shoulders. “No safety doors. I don’t think being further in would protect anyone.”

 

I nodded absently. “We don’t know how high the ship was when the outer parts were lost. If the air was sucked out… or if they don’t breathe oxygen...”

 

“It’s like a big wheel,” Debbie called. She’d been walking further along the corridor as I spoke. I rushed to catch up with her. “See, another hall here, inward. I think they head to the centre, like spokes on a wheel, but I can’t see that far with the lights out.”

 

The hall did, indeed, disappear into darkness. I morphed part of myself into an owl to take a look. “It’s interrupted somehow,” I told her with my still-human mouth, “about… halfway down, I think. A door there. A big one.”

 

“Can you open it?”

 

“Maybe. Probably not. I can try.” I demorphed and set off down the narrow corridor towards the door. Debbie hesitated, but followed.

 

The corridor widened before being blocked by the door. Good. I’d need that room.

 

“I’m going to turn into something scary,” I warned her as I demorphed my own features. “Please don’t shoot me.”

 

“Scary? In here?” Debbie said faintly as she turned away to give me some privacy. “Oh, no, this is just a perfectly regular day, not scary at all.”

 

I undressed and focused on Jara Hamee.

 

I grew. My skin thickened. My bones twisted and took on alignments that no Earth animal’s bone had; organs melted away to be replaced by things that had never evolved in any of Earth’s children. Should I be worried at how routine alien anatomy was becoming to me?

 

Debbie took several steps back, staring at me.

 

“It okay,” I said, tripping over the human words with my hork-bajir mouth. “I will open the door now.”

 

I raised an arm to the door and struck.

 

The blade on my wrist cracked.

 

“Aaaaargh!” That was me, howling in pain. I pressed my beak closed and focused. Okay. I had to be smart about this. I could do it, I knew I could do it, because it didn’t matter if I damaged my body. I could afford to put more force into this than any real hork-bajir. Ignoring the throbbing in my forearm, I examined the door for a moment (it was a sliding door), then placed my elbow blade against it and pushed my entire body weight into it, forward and down. _Don’t think like a normal person_ , I told myself, _human or hork-bajir_. _Limits don’t matter. Risks don’t matter. You can break every bone if you want. You need the force that lets_ _mother_ _s lift cars off babies and children drag their parents_ _out of burning buildings. Your brain is lying to you about how much force you can put into this. Put more in. You have more_.

 

I pushed harder.

 

My feet scraped on the ground; I dug my claws in as best I could and pushed, pushed, until my blade cut gouged its way into the metal; a little dent. Good enough. My elbow-blade was stuck in the door. I changed my stance and shoved sideways, forcing the door open. It resisted, but something cracked inside and it slid open an inch right before my elbow blade snapped off, taking quite a bit of skin and muscle with it. I didn’t look at the wound – I didn’t want to see my own bones, especially when they weren’t actually mine. I jammed my fingers into the little gap and hauled with all my weight, pressing my feet against the wall for better leverage.

 

Ah, yes, that was better. I dragged the door open, a half-inch at a time, as things inside me made little popping noises and started to hurt. When I had a gap wide enough to squeeze through, I stopped. I demorphed and dressed as Debbie very cautiously peeked, then squeezed, through the gap.

 

“Don’t tell me,” I moaned. “There’s another door, isn’t there?”

 

“Yes,” she said, “but I think you should see this.”

 

I followed her. What the door had blocked off was another big, circular corridor. It was a fair bit wider than the one we were emerging from. The big door on the other side, identical to the one we’d just broached, suggested that ours continued further into the ship, but to get there we’d have to cross this rather larger encircling one, that was cut both deeper into the floor and higher into the ceiling than ours. Big panels of lighting, each about three feet wide, were interspersed every six feet in the ceiling; about half of them were still lit, the rest smashed.

 

I told myself that the chills I was feeling were from the horror movie vibe. There was no reason to think that this part of the ship was any more dangerous than anything else.

 

“If we follow this hall, we might find a door to the other side that’s already broken open,” Debbie said, stepping down into the new corridor and heading counter-clockwise. She didn’t seem any more worried about this one than anything else. I let her take the lead.

 

This corridor was mostly clean, except for the broken glass everywhere from the lights. I picked a piece up to examine it. It bent a little in my hands. Not glass… plastic? Maybe. Might be some alien thing I didn’t know about.

 

We didn’t walk far before we found our way blocked. The giant, puffy bug was almost as wide as the corridor, the right side of its shiny red and yellow carapace split open. It was twitching.

 

The seven legs of its left side grabbed at the floor, trying to drag it forward. Its six sets of antennae waved towards us. It gave a soft, half-shriek, half-hissing sound.

 

Debbie backed hurriedly away. She looked ready to bolt. I quickly stepped in front of her.

 

“Can we… uh… help you?” I asked the giant bug. It shrieked at me.

 

“What is it?!” Debbie hissed in my ear.

 

“I have no idea,” I whispered.

 

“Is it… intelligent?”

 

“Again. No idea.” I took a tentative step forward. It dragged itself forward and snapped a pair of mandibles at my leg.

 

“I can’t safely shoot a shotgun in a space like this,” Debbie whispered. “We should go the other way.”

 

I hesitated. Everything in my experience and training with my dad, everything I’d sworn to myself since meting Aftran, told me I had to try to help. Either an animal or a person was hurt. But what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t communicate. I couldn’t restrain it to stop it from hurting me. And even if I could, I had no idea how to help it. I could… ease its passage… but I had no idea whether it could survive its wounds. Maybe it healed well, like hork-bajir, and the wounds weren’t as fatal as they looked. Maybe, if I tried to give it mercy, I’d just be committing murder.

 

I’d lingered too long. Debbie wrapped a hand around my wrist and marched firmly in the opposite direction, tugging me along.

 

Moving clockwise, the passage was mostly clear and unblocked. It wasn’t that long before we found an inward-leading door that had been busted open by the crash. We took it. The corridor we moved into continued narrow and dark, leading straight inward. There was a soft green glow somewhere at the end of it. I tried to calm my racing heart and took the lead again. Debbie, apparently deciding that there was nowhere in this ship she’d be able to safely shoot, shouldered her shotgun before following.

 

“You’re handling this well,” I whispered to her. Somehow, it seemed like the environment for whispering.

 

“No choice,” she whispered back. “I’d love to go gibber in a corner somewhere, but that’s going to have to wait until we’ve dealt with these aliens, isn’t it?”

 

“We’ll make an alien-fighter out of you yet.”

 

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Cassie, but after this is over I hope to never see any kind of alien, crashed spaceship or mysterious shapeshifter ever again.”

 

“For what it’s worth, I hope you don’t have to see any such thing either.”

 

The soft green glow was coming through an open door at the end of the corridor. As we got closer, I could make out large control panels, like something out of Star Trek, interspaced with B-movie fancy levers and big lights, all green. The room was round.

 

I clenched my fists, willing them not to tremble. This had to be the center of the ship.

 

It was a wreck.

 

The panels around the outside were mostly intact, at least from the outside, but something had happened in the centre of the room. It looked like there’d been some sort of explosion. Parts of burned aliens and fragments of scorched machinery had been flung outward to scatter across the floor and impale themselves in the walls. Above us, a domed roof extended beyond the saucer part of the ship, with little windows showing the blue sky through the tree hologram.

 

I kicked aside a severed grey arm. Most of the body parts looked like the alien we’d found hiding in the storage cupboard, but there were a couple I didn’t recognise. Debbie found a console to throw up behind, then stumbled back with a cry. I headed over to see what she’d found.

 

A human skeleton. A few shreds of burnt flesh were still clinging to it. I looked away, blinking back tears. Debbie threw up again.

 

“Okay,” I said very calmly, “I suppose we have some work to do. There has to be some way to figure out what we need here.” I recognised the dull monotone in my voice. I sounded like Ax, calmly reporting that he was about to die. Or perhaps like somebody in shock. It wasn’t all that easy to tell those apart. I sat down, quickly, so I wouldn’t fall over, and looked up away from the carnage, at the sky and the hologram above us. At the dark mass moving into place above the hologram. My heart skipped – I knew that shape.

 

“Debbie! We have to go!”

 

“The others,” she said quickly.

 

“Hopefully they have the good sense to hide and get out of here, too. We’ll meet them outside. Come on.” I pointed to the silhouette above. “We need to be out of here before anyone from that thing comes down under the hologram, because if they see us, we are in a world of trouble.” I didn’t waste any more time; I just focused on the hork-bajir within me and began to grow.

 

“What is it?” she asked.

 

“It’s called a blade ship,” I said as my skin thickened and my blades began to grow. “It’s the personal ship of Visser Three.”


	14. Chapter 14

“Who is Visser – ”

 

<You don’t want to know! Come on!> I pulled Debbie up onto my still-morphing shoulders and looked for something to climb. She was sensible enough not to cut herself. Hork-bajir are actually fairly easy to ride; their blades are designed to help them carry their babies as well as cut bark, and while Debbie was rather larger than a hork-bajir baby, she had no real problem finding a position that meant she could sit rather stably on me as I leaned forward and used my powerful arms to pull us up the side of the dome.

 

Hork-bajir are built for climbing. They can climb like monkeys or squirrels. Hork-bajir controllers usually march along the ground, the yeerks not being too comfortable with trees for some reason, but my ancestors were tree-climbers, too, and I’d spent enough time with Jara and Ket to know what they could do. A trailing cable – that would do. A fragment of metal – good enough. A soft layer of rubber between the metal and the glass windows – I could stick a blade in that. Soon, we were climbing out a window, into the sunlight.

 

Directly into the view of nine Dracon-wielding Controllers. Five humans, two hork-bajir, and two bipedal ape-looking beings I wasn’t familiar with.

 

Great.

 

They hadn’t expected anyone to crawl out of the ship. It took them a moment to turn their attention from whatever they’d been trying to get a shot at and towards us. I used that moment to dash for a loose piece of metal on the ship’s hull and pull it up as a shield. Moments later, Dracon beams glanced off it. I’d seen Dracons shoot right through metal, so I knew the shield wouldn’t last long. They were already pausing – were they adjusting their weapons to melt the shield?

 

Debbie didn’t waste time thinking about the pause. Once the shooting stopped, she rose on my shoulders high enough to aim her shotgun and fire. Someone screamed. She bent down behind the shield again.

 

<Are you okay?> I asked.

 

“No,” she hissed. “No, I am not okay! There are bodies everywhere! I just shot someone! We are about to die and I have no idea where my father or son are!”

 

<My guess would be that they’re at the spot that these guys were aiming their weapons before they saw us.>

 

“Oh, right, my family are getting shot at! That’s so much better to know!”

 

I turned enough to see Debbie’s face. She was bright-eyed and shivering, right on the edge of panic. I had no idea what she’d do if that panic won.

 

The metal under our feet was frail, the tough outer hull being our shield. I kicked it in. <Go,> I said. <Find your family and get out of here. I have to do something about these guys. Or about the ship.>

 

“There are nine of them and you’re unarmed! You don’t even know what to do about the ship!”

 

<Believe it or not, this is not the worst situation I’ve been in. Go.>

 

Debbie didn’t need further convincing. She dropped out of sight. Dracons fired. I felt my shield heat and begin to melt; I tore the metal free from the ship and bolted once again for the dome in the centre.

 

My shield fell apart, liquid metal running down my right arm, as I dove into the ship. I ignored the burning and concentrated on not killing myself with the landing. I landed, rolled, got to my feet; would they follow? They might follow. Dammit, they’d seen me in hork-bajir morph. If I’d just been Cassie they might think I was part of Yami’s family, a low-priority human to mop up for secrecy, but unless word of the free hork-bajir had reached the Empire proper, they’d know I was an ‘andalite bandit’. And the Blade ship meant Visser Three, who would definitely order my death or capture.

 

It took the heat off Yami’s family, but it gave me very little time to work with.

 

I looked around at all the electronic buttons, the little levers, the lights. None of them meant anything to me. Some of them were labelled, but I didn’t recognise the alphabet.

 

I needed Ax for this.

 

But I didn’t have Ax. What did I have? Problems, mostly. A right arm that, I realised, wasn’t able to move. Yeerks on my tail. Innocents to protect. I dragged my hand across a display of shiny buttons, drawing an angry buzz from the console. I used my arm blades to tear a panel off and blinked at the electronics inside – meaningless. Angrily, I yanked out a couple of handfuls of wires.

 

All around me, green lights turned red. Something beeped at urgent, regular intervals, a bit longer than one second apart. The consoles all around me showed some kind of obscure shape that changed with every beep.

 

Chill crept into my heart.

 

Everyone in the ship was dead or dying. What kind of species puts a force field up after their ship has crashed? What kind of species programs their ship to image the area while crashing and then put up a hologram to hide it from above?

 

A species that really, really doesn’t want anyone poking around their ruined ships.

 

I didn’t recognise the images on the screens around me, but I recognised the situation, sure enough. It was a countdown.

 

I ran.

 

No time to heal my arm and climb. I bolted for the door we’d come in through and hoped like anything that I knew the way out. <Evacuate!> I screamed in open thought-speak, hoping that Yami’s family was in range. <It’s gonna blow!>

 

I had no idea how long we would have. I ran as fast as Jara Hamee’s legs could carry me. I hit the circular passage in the middle of the ship, bolted anticlockwise, found the door I’d forced open, turned through it… the path was fairly easy to remember, but it was a long run. My muscles burned, and I might still have to fight my way out.

 

<It’s going to self-destruct!> I screamed as I looked for the storage room we’d entered through. <Everyone out from under the force field!>

 

There! I dashed into the room, knocked aside the shelf with dentures, jumped over the alien’s body, and I was outside. Maruntu was by the tarp, firing his Dracon beam with one hand and shielding Debbie with a piece of ship hull in the other as she squirmed under the tarp to join Yami on the other side. Maruntu handled the gun clumsily, like he’d never used a handgun before; there was a long cut down the inside of his right calf, bleeding freely, and several burns on his body. I dashed for them and took the weapon and shield for him. <Go! I’ll cover you!>

 

Maruntu nodded and got under the tarp. Most of the yeerks had fled, or at least, were doing something that didn’t involve shooting us; I only had two human-Controllers to deal with. Knowing my shield wouldn’t hold up long, I did my best to keep them busy, using cover fire to give Maruntu time to escape. I didn’t bother to check the setting of the Dracon beam; I didn’t really have time, and besides, a stun was just a slower kill from inside the forcefield of a self-destructing ship.

 

Finally, Maruntu was free. I slid under the tarp myself. It immediately snagged on my blades. Nothing I could to about that. Using my one good arm, I rolled myself in the tarp as best I could and dragged myself under the field.

 

It wasn’t a perfect barrier. Spots on my back and legs burned as I rolled. I clambered to my feet, dropping the tarp, and bolted for the trees.

 

Behind me, the world lit up.

 

There was the sound of sudden impact and bright, red light. I turned to see a dome of fire, encompassing everything inside the forcefield. It lasted for just a few seconds before fading into a sheet of slowly falling bits, nothing any bigger than a piece of gravel. The force field dropped, the hologram winked out. Above, the blade ship hovered. I couldn’t see Yami’s family anywhere.

 

I demorphed, put on some osprey wings, and went looking for the family.

 

They were making good time on foot, moving almost silently, at least to human ears. They left no visible trail behind them. They’d all discarded their shoes, I noticed, along with most of their supplies. Debbie still had her gun. Yami had his backpack. That was about it. They were moving deeper into the bush.

 

I followed.

 

Maruntu had wrapped up his bleeding leg to leave no trail, but he was limping badly. Still, he gave no cry of pain or broken twig in their path to give them away. Debbie wept, silently; tears dripped down her cheeks onto her shirt. Yami jumped at every rustle, staring into the trees.

 

I’d done this. I’d crashed the plane early, into their radio tower. I’d brought the yeerks down on their head. And then I’d dragged them to the crashed ship, into battle. If not for me, the yeerks would’ve come out here and done what they needed to and left, and this family would be none the wiser. They wouldn’t be out fleeing death in the forest, trying to make sense of all the horror they’d just seen.

 

I, myself, was trying not to think about those bits of exploded aliens, the human skeleton, my own flesh burning. What must it be like for them?

 

And for what? I had no idea. What had the yeerks wanted? What had the mission even been? I was pretty sure I’d achieved it. We Animorphs always seemed to make good shock troops for the designs of other aliens. But what had I traded this family’s innocence for?

 

I kept an eye on things. The family stayed well away from the yeerks, who sieved through the gravel for awhile before giving up. A few small fires started around the edge of the zone of destruction during their search, where hot debris touched dry scrub; they put them out when somebody pointed out that if whatever they were looking for was intact on the edge of the zone, they didn’t want it to burn. I thought that if it were that delicate, there was no way it’d be in any decent shape in the rubble. They must have thought the same, because they eventually gave up and dejectedly boarded the Blade ship, which – to my surprise – rose and recloaked. Visser Three must have decided that it wasn’t worth searching the bush for a few human witnesses and an andalite bandit.

 

I headed out to find the family again. The search of the rubble had taken about two hours and they’d made decent distance.

 

<The yeerks are gone,> I told them, landing on a branch where they could see me. <Whatever they wanted was destroyed. They don’t seem to think you’re worth the trouble. It should be safe to return now.>

 

“Oh, should it?” Debbie asked acidly. “I’m so glad.”

 

“None of this is her fault, Deb.” Maruntu rubbed his temples. He looked tired. “I think… I think we all need to rest,” he said. “I know it’s early, but we can’t wear ourselves out. Tomorrow, we head for home. And if we’re fast,” he grinned, “we might get there in time for Cassie to catch the postie.”


	15. Chapter 15

We rested for the rest of the day, mostly in tense silence. I borrowed more clothes from Debbie – my last set had been destroyed when I morphed hork-bajir on the ship – and spent as much time away from the campsite as I believably could, to give the family time to talk and wrap their heads around things.

 

With the yeerks gone, there was no real point in being silent and invisible in the forest. In the morning, I morphed horse and carried the family as far as I could before getting dangerously tired. Then they walked while I rested, and when I could, I flew to meet them before morphing horse again. We made very good time that way.

 

When we made it out of the forest, I insisted on scouting ahead while they got the four-wheelers ready. I wanted to be absolutely sure that there were no Controllers still staking out the house. It seemed clear. I flew back to tell the others.

 

Only to find Maruntu lying on the ground, Debbie and Yami crouching over him.

 

His injured leg was unbandaged, and my keen osprey eyes immediately saw the problem. The gouge on his leg was deep and oozing pus. His entire calf was swollen. The infection had spread up his thigh, and under what remained of his trousers from where Debbie had cut the leg away for a better look.

 

I landed and demorphed. Debbie and Yami carefully averted their eyes, but I had no time for modesty. I knelt by Maruntu, barely noticing the coat that Debbie draped over my shoulders. I pulled his shirt up. It there was any infection in his abdomen, I couldn’t find it. But that didn’t mean much, since all I was looking at was his skin.

 

He was pale and sweating. I pushed back an eyelid – the eye beneath was glassy and unfocused.

 

“We need to call an ambulance,” I said.

 

“How?” Debbie asked. “The radio tower’s out!”

 

“Can you fix it?”

 

“Alone? No. And even if I could, not fast enough.”

 

“The postie is coming tomorrow,” Yami said. “Will he… is that soon enough?”

 

“I can’t tell,” I said. “I help heal animals, sometimes, but I’m not a doctor.” I glanced at Debbie. Her expression said everything.

 

She didn’t think he’d live that long.

 

“Coal,” Yami said, “and ash...”

 

“Too late,” Debbie said, shaking her head. “If the fool had said something a few days ago...”

 

“We have to get him back to the homestead,” I said. “We might… we might be able to do something there.”

 

“Do you have a plan?” Debbie asked.

 

“No.” I morphed osprey again and headed off to set up.

 

I arrived at the house an hour or so before the others would arrive. Okay. I had time. I needed a plan. In about an hour, I was going to have a patient, a badly infected patient. What would my dad do? Antibiotics. I didn’t have antibiotics. Other vets. I didn’t have any doctors around. Help the animal die painlessly. Out of the question.

 

Okay. I didn’t have my dad’s tools. What did I have?

 

I searched the house for a first aid kit. There was one in the kitchen. Not much useful in it. A couple of syringes, some antiseptic wipes, some band-aids, panadol. I scrubbed down the kitchen table quickly and dumped the kit on it – maybe something would be useful. What else did I have? Soap and clean water, presumably. I put some on to boil. There was vodka in the pantry; I took that to the table, too. So I could sterilise the outside of a wound, but that wouldn’t really help with the infection. I couldn’t exactly flush out the inside of the wound; the alcohol would…

 

No. That wasn’t right. I _could_ do that, couldn’t I?

 

I didn’t have my dad’s tools, but I did have an Animorph’s tools. I searched the house again, a proper plan in mind this time. I sterilised all my tools in vodka and then in boiling water. I had barely finished before the family turned up, Debbie and Yami carrying Maruntu.

 

“Put him on the table,” I told them, and they did. They looked at me expectantly. Like they had no doubt that I would somehow know what to do.

 

And why wouldn’t they think so? I’d shown up with magic powers, told them about an alien invasion, and dragged them out to help me blow up a spaceship. If I said I could do something, why wouldn’t they believe it? They expected me to have a plan.

 

Fortunately, I did.

 

I pushed up the sleeves of my too-big, borrowed sweater. Maruntu was barely conscious.

 

“Pour him some vodka,” I told Debbie. “A lot of vodka. This is going to hurt.”


	16. Chapter 16

Could I kill the infection in Maruntu’s body with the tools at hand? No. Could I keep it from destroying anything vital to survival until he got to hospital? Maybe.

 

The leg was unsaveable. I knew that just by looking. He might get through this with some thigh, but everything below the knee had no chance. Whatever was in the wound, it worked fast.

 

“Maruntu,” I said, “can you hear me?”

 

After several seconds, he nodded weakly.

 

“Is English his native language?” I asked the others. Debbie shook her head. “Can you translate for him, please?” I asked. “I don’t think he’s going to have the focus for it.” She nodded.

 

“Maruntu,” I said, “I need to borrow your form, like I do the form of a bird or a horse. Is that okay?”

 

Debbie quietly murmured something to him in a language I didn’t understand. He nodded.

 

I put my hand on his shoulder and focused. Maruntu’s jaw unclenched, his muscles relaxed. Then, a moment later, I was done, and the pain returned. “Vodka,” I told Debbie, and she lifted his head to help him swallow some.

 

I concentrated on the form before me and grew. Soon my clothes were uncomfortably tight. It was a simple morph; human bodies always are. I took a length of clean clear tubing I’d found in the shed and duct taped a syringe from the first aid kid onto it. (I hadn’t found a way to sterilise the duct tape. Hopefully it wouldn’t matter.) The next syringe I gave to Debbie. “I need your help,” I said.

 

She took it, hands trembling. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

 

“There’s an artery in my back. Right here.” I traced a line with a marker. “Very close to my spine, see? I need you to get that syringe into it, where the flow is nice and powerful, and then pull the plunger all the way out and attach it to the tube.”

 

“I’m not a doctor! What if I miss?”

 

“Then try again. You can’t kill me this way.”

 

“Hang on,” Yami said, “I’ve seen this on television. You’re doing a transfusion, right?”

 

I nodded.

 

“You can just do that with your arm, can’t you?”

 

“If I had proper equipment, yes. But I don’t have any valves, so I need to make sure that the blood is flowing more strongly in my body than his so the blood moves the right way. And this is going into the artery in his upper thigh.”

 

Debbie didn’t waste time looking for an explanation; she pushed the needle into my back.

 

“Do you have it?” I asked.

 

“How can I tell?!”

 

I reached around to touch the syringe. “No. Try again.”

 

On the third try, she hit the artery. She pulled the plunger and attached the hose. Blood started to flow down the thin tube. I pinched it near my end and ran my pinched fingers down it in long, smooth strokes, pumping the blood along. When it started to emerge from the other end, I found the artery in Maruntu’s infected thigh and pushed it in, as high up the artery as I could manage. I shook his calf until his wound started to bleed freely; Marunto groaned in pain.

 

“What exactly is happening here?” Debbie asked, looking sick.

 

“I’m trying to flush the wound,” I explained. “I can’t kill the bacteria, but I do have an unlimited supply of Maruntu’s own blood to flush them out. Hopefully I can hold them at bay until the doctors get here.”

 

I sat on the table next to Maruntu. I didn’t want to sit on a chair and put myself lower than him; it might make it harder to move blood into his body. I wished I’d thought to have him put on the floor. I pushed blood through the tube steadily with my fingers, helping along the pressure caused by our twin pulses. Yami ran to get a bucket for all the blood gushing from Maruntu’s leg, then he and Debbie left us alone. I supposed that we were a gruesome sight. If it had been my dad or grandad, I wouldn’t want to watch either.

 

After half an hour, I was feeling faint. I demorphed, remorphed, emptied the blood bucket. Had Debbie insert the needle again. By the fifth morph, she was able to confidently hit the artery first try.

 

“This might be a useful life skill,” she remarked wryly, checking her father’s pulse.

 

“I hope not,” I said.

 

And it was working. It was hard to tell at first, because the swelling took a while to go down, but by about two in the morning the infection had definitely lost a couple of inches of ground. I couldn’t help grinning in relief. I’d been wondering over the past hour or so whether the whole thing had been a horrible mistake; whether all I was doing was replacing his white-cell-stocked, battle-ready blood with a fresh supply that didn’t ‘know’ there was an infection to fight, and thus stopping him from fighting it. It was a calculated risk, as that was a battle his blood was losing anyway, but I was still glad that the flushing seemed to be working in our favour.

 

We chased it further down the leg. I had to make a couple of new incisions to flush the infected blood out of specific areas. These shallow cuts were washed with antiseptic every now and again, but I didn’t think it would do much, being washed away so quickly by the influx of clean blood.

 

By four in the morning, Maruntu was fully coherent and not feverish. I supposed that this probably meant that his body wasn’t getting the message that it was infected any more, meaning nothing important was getting poisoned. I took this as a good sign, although it meant we had to give him a lot more alcohol.

 

By seven in the morning, I was pretty sure that there wasn’t too much dangerous infection left more than a couple of inches above the knee. I began to relax. This looked like it was actually going to work. After everything, we were actually going to pull this off. This innocent man who had done so much to help me wasn’t going to die because of me.

 

Of course, that was when the yeerks showed up.


	17. Chapter 17

<Well, well, well, andalite. I had given up on finding you among all those plants. I simply came here to eliminate the witnesses… I admit, I am surprised that the place that you chose to hide, with all of this open space, was in a human dwelling. I suppose it is my lucky day.>

 

The mental voice hit me with a wave of malevolent evil, the kind of feeling that overwhelms your higher senses and makes you want to run or faint or beg for death or mercy, it didn’t matter which. I clenched my teeth. Maruntu, who hadn’t felt Visser Three’s presence before, went very pale.

 

“Do you have a basement?” I asked him.

 

He shook his head.

 

Dammit. Where was I supposed to hide these people? Where was I supposed to hide myself? The house would of course be surrounded; I had no hope of escape. I couldn’t trade myself for the family; I knew too much. We were all going to die, and for what? I had no idea what we’d accomplished out there. Was it worth four lives? Was it worth, after ‘dying’ on the Animorphs once, doing it again, for good? Leaving Jake blaming himself, Rachel without her best friend, Aftran without her peace advocate, my parents without their only daughter? Or the friends and family of Yami, Debbie and Maruntu with similar holes in their lives?

 

I didn’t know.

 

Debbie and Yami dashed into the room, looking terrified. They looked at me.

 

“Are any aliens in the house?” I asked.

 

They shook their heads.

 

<Come out, come out, little andalite. Don’t make us go in there and fight you. This can be quick and easy, or it can be complicated and painful.>

 

“Do you still have the Dracon beam?” I asked Debbie. “The alien ray gun thing?”

 

She nodded, handed Yami her shotgun, and went to get it. Yami sidled up to the window and peeked around the curtain. “I can’t see anybody out there,” he called.

 

“They’re definitely there.” I glanced at Maruntu. He was sharp and focused, if a little drunk. I pulled the needles out.

 

“Can they turn invisible?”

 

“I don’t think so. I hope not.”

 

<You realise I could simply eliminate this dwelling with the weapons on my Blade ship? We are so alone out here. No outside human witnesses. It would be so easy. But first, andalite, I want to offer you the opportunity of joining the glorious Yeerk Empire. You andalites are so honorable in death, I know – but there is nobody out here to remember your honor, andalite. Not unless there are more of you in there, hiding. There is nobody to know whether you die nobly fighting me, or as a coward hiding under a human roof, or if you choose simple surrender. There is none to know whether you came willingly or not. So think on this, andalite – without the stories and songs and heroism, when there is nobody to respect or to condemn, when your blade brothers have left you truly alone… how valuable is honorable death to you then, compared with survival?>

 

Debbie put the Dracon in my hands. I adjusted the power. “Hold still,” I told Maruntu. “This is going to hurt an awful lot.”

 

Then I aimed just above his knee and neatly sliced his leg off.

 

Maruntu screamed. I checked the wound. It looked exactly like I expected it to look – a clean cut, neatly cauterised by the beam. I’d seen the weapons do that on the battlefield dozens of times. I tried not to show how unsettled I was, doing it myself.

 

<You have three Earth minutes to decide, andalite.>

 

“They’re everyone’s minutes,” I muttered to myself in my best Marco voice. “Why are you even here, Visser? We’re on the other side of the world! Learn to delegate!” I was so tired, emotionally and physically. I’d been morphing way too much for almost a week, I’d just stayed up half the night morphing every half hour or so to heal a patient, and now after all that work, he was going to die along with the rest of us. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t care.

 

“What do we do?” Debbie asked.

 

“I don’t know!” I snapped. “I used up all my desperate, last-ditch ideas on this first aid here. It’s somebody else’s turn.”

 

“Cassie,” Maruntu said. “They want you, yes?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“We are mostly harmless witnesses to kill just to stop us talking, yes? If they had to decide...”

 

“They’d take me. Yeah.” Could I use myself as bait to save them? Maybe. Aftran’s voice rose in my head, scorning me for always jumping to self-sacrifice. I ignored the memory.

 

Maruntu nodded. “Then get some of my clothes and put them on,” he said. “You, Debbie and Yami make a run for it on the bikes. I’ll pretend to be you and distract them.”

 

“No,” I said. “You’ll never pull it off.”

 

“We have two minutes,” he snapped. “How do you propose to save my daughter and grandson?”

 

“I… I don’t...”

 

“Then do it! There’s no time!”

 

Debbie, looking ready to faint, was already pushing some of Maruntu’s clothing into my arms. Half a minute later, we were out the door and running for the bikes.

 

And then it became obvious why Yami hadn’t been able to see the Controllers surrounding us.

 

They were on the roof.

 

We dodged Dracon fire as best we could and dashed for the four-wheelers. Yami and Debbie each took one; I jumped on the back of Yami’s, and we were off.

 

The four-wheelers, I knew, weren’t going to dodge the Dracon beams for long. They couldn’t turn fast enough. A beam burned the sand feet ahead of us to glass, and moments after it stopped, we were riding over that glass. We were definitely going to die.

 

Then, from the house, Maruntu’s voice. “Come and fight me properly, Visser!”

 

<Ah, the noble warrior emerges.> The Visser sounded amused. <Still won’t speak to me properly, hmm? Never mind. If these humans are the price of your honourable death, so be it.> The shooting behind us stopped. Yami’s shoulders were tense under my hands; they didn’t relax. I glanced at Debbie. She was crying.

 

But we didn’t stop. I was vividly reminded of hiding while Elfangor got eaten, of fleeing because there was nothing else we could do. But I’d only known Elfangor five minutes. Maruntu was their family.

 

I was in morph; I could thought-speak. I summoned every good feeling I could find in my exhausted mind and broadcast them gently to the pair, as best I could. Yami shuddered in front of me but slowly began to calm. Behind us, the Visser laughed coldly.

 

And that was when the postie showed up.


	18. Chapter 18

He was a balding white man in a van, driving along a road that barely existed between two high hills. In thirty seconds or so, he would’ve been visible from the house. He looked about seventy, was playing some kind of rock I didn’t recognise at high volume, and idly scratched the lean dog on the seat beside him with one hand. He stopped when he saw us.

 

“Deb, what’s – ?”

 

“Rob,” Deb gasped, getting off the bike, “turn around. We all have to get out of here. My father is… he’s...”

 

Rob looked at me. “What’s wrong?”

 

“That’s not my father,” Debbie said, waving a hand. “Her name’s Cassie, it’s complicated but – ”

 

“Can you not give people my name?” I said. “Secret, remember?”

 

“Cassie?” Rob frowned at me. “What are you doing out here?”

 

The Visser’s cold laughter ran in our heads again. <Are you sure that this is the form you choose to die in, andalite? I’ll give you a chance, a special mercy, in honor of our history together. I’ll let you demorph and die properly.>

 

“Rob, we can’t explain but you have to trust – ”

 

“No time,” he said. “Explain later. You two look after Jess if we don’t come back.” Before I could react, he’d swept me off the bike into his arms.

 

Debbie and Yami dashed for the truck. I opened my mouth to ask what the hell Rob thought he was doing, but as soon as Debbie and Yami had turned their backs, Rob vanished, and I was in the arms of a bipedal doglike robot. I glanced at the hologram surrounding us, but it was incomprehensible from the outside.

 

“What are we?” I asked the chee shakily.

 

“A kangaroo.” He jumped. It was a jarring ride back to the house.

 

“What are you doing out here?” I asked him.

 

“I live here,” he said. “What are you doing out here?”

 

“Our friend Erek – ”

 

“Erek King?”

 

“Is that bad?”

 

“Not for you. That chee is the god’s joke, I swear. We have non-interference treaties for a reason!”

 

“He didn’t interfere,” I said quickly. “He didn’t tell us – ”

 

“Oh, I’m sure he said nothing. I’m sure whatever he did managed to _completely accidentally_ get you here.” We were at the house. Rob got as close as he dared and turned himself into a tree while nobody was looking. Time for a plan.

 

Maruntu leaned against the outer wall of the house, propped on his remaining leg. The Dracon beam was in his hand. The armed Controllers around him weren’t shooting; they merely kept their weapons trained on him as Visser Three swaggered in front of him, showing off for the troops. I couldn’t help but notice that those troops looked a lot less confident than the Visser did. Their Dracon beams didn’t move for an instant, their laughter was forced and distracted. Had ‘andalite bandits’ pulling last-minute escapes simply become expected now? How low was morale? Was that something we could use?

 

 _One thing at a time, Cassie_ , I told myself. First: rescue Maruntu. Somehow.

 

“Okay,” I said quietly into where I presumed Rob’s ear was, “can you get me close? Maybe we can… switch him for me, somehow, and you can get him out of here.”

 

“So that you can die instead?”

 

In a single, sudden movement, Maruntu raised his Dracon beam and shot at Visser Three. The shot went wide. It went so wide that it almost hit one of the Visser’s background troops. Somebody fired; Maruntu screamed as three of his fingers were burned away. He dropped the Dracon.

 

<Mirku one one four is an excellent marksman,> Visser Three said wryly. <He could give you a quick, if cowardly death, if you prefer. I will give you one more chance to demorph and fight like an andalite.>

 

Nothing for it. <Visser,> I said in the coldest, most andalite-like voice I could muster, <the human is not worth your time. It is me that you want.>

 

“What are you doing?!” Rob hissed.

 

<I don’t know! Improvising! If you didn’t want me to do anything you shouldn’t have brought me back!> I stepped out of the bush, a healthier, whole version of Maruntu. I made sure that the Visser could see both of my empty hands.

 

Okay, I’d initiated a plan. Now I had to _make_ the plan. Important to get the order right next time.

 

<It talks!> the Visser said, sounding delighted. <And all it took was getting it on its own. We are playing the mirror game, are we? You realise that a decoy hardly works when I can simply kill you both?> He lifted a hand to give a signal.

 

“Wait!” I said aloud. “This is no decoy. I am merely revealing myself. Let the human go.”

 

<Why?>

 

I thought desperately. “Perhaps we can trade.”

 

<For a random human’s life?> The Visser’s eyes narrowed. <What is he to you? Why would one of you care for one of these creatures, hmm?>

 

“We fight for the freedom of all humans.”

 

<Oh, don’t give me that. Humans have died in this war and more will do so. Why this one?>

 

Right, this was why we tried not to talk to Visser Three.

 

“That isn’t your concern,” I said.

 

<Fair enough. What is my concern, however, is just what you believe you have to trade. Do you intend to surrender yourself to me alive?>

 

“Never!”

 

<Then do you intend to give me military secrets?>

 

“No!”

 

<Then I fail to see what you have. Kill the – >

 

“Perhaps I… _we_ … should show you what we have,” I invented desperately. I might be alone, I might be in an unfamiliar environment, but I had a chee backing me up! I walked away from the hologram bush as I spoke, drawing the Controllers’ gazes away from Rob. I tried a little laugh. “Why, Visser, did you think that I would be here alone? My job was merely to distract you while my brothers were… indisposed.”

 

The Visser’s eyes narrowed. <Indisposed.>

 

“Yes. You arrived sooner than anticipated. We needed time to plunder the ship and set this trap.” _Please, Rob, be smart and inventive_.

 

He was. A gorilla sauntered into view, its big arms carefully cradling a huge sphere made of interlocking metal and crystal plates. There were gaps in the sphere. Ominous sparks jumped from them at random.

 

I had no idea what the thing was supposed to be, but the Visser clearly did. He took several steps back. <The Skrit Na had one of _those_? > he said, disbelieving. <On their ship?>

 

“Lucky, isn’t it?” I said, trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about. “I don’t think it can stand much use. But worth it, I think, to destroy an _abomination_.” I spat this last word, with every bit of my hatred and Ax’s disgust behind it.

 

<That thing is extremely unstable. If you detonate it here, you will both die.>

 

“As I said. Worth it.”

 

The Visser glared at Rob, a glare of pure hatred. <Everyone. Retreat.>

 

“Sir,” a Controller said, “I can still – ”

 

<Do not shoot!> He snapped. <If you kill the big one, he will drop it and kill us all. If you kill the other, he will detonate it in revenge. Do you know nothing of andalites, fool? Retreat! Now!>

 

And with that, they were gone. Rob motioned that we should meet inside the house. We did.

 

Once out of sight, he dropped the gorilla hologram to put on his old postie again. Maruntu blinked. “Rob? What?”

 

“I’ll explain later, old friend,” Rob said, steadying Maruntu gently. “For now, we need to get out of here before they blow this house up from space. Cassie, get small.”

 

I didn’t ask questions. I simply started to demorph. I was halfway to lizard when Rob lifted Maruntu into his arms, stuck me on his shoulder, put up a hologram, and left. I didn’t bother to ask what we were hiding as this time; the chee knew what they were doing. Soon, the entire family was packed in the back of a mail van, Yami sorting through the letters that Rob had been about to deliver them, Debbie obsessively inspecting her father’s injuries. Rob, looking like Rob again, whistled and scratched Jess the dog as he drove as if he was on a perfectly ordinary mail run. I hugged my knees under yet another stolen jacket and tried to sort out what had happened.

 

I’d saved him. Maruntu had been my patient, my responsibility, he’d been in trouble because of me, and I’d actually saved him. He’d be fine. He’d be there for his family.

 

What had I given up for it?

 

Had I said anything to the Visser that put holes in our story? Anything that would give him a clue, when we stopped to think, that we might not be andalites? Any spare slang, any ignorance of andalite customs? Slang could be explained away by having blended into human society occasionally, I supposed, but I didn’t want that suspicion there in the first place. What had this mission cost? What had we gained?

 

We kept silent with the Visser as much as possible for a reason. I needed Ax to interpret the alien stuff. I needed Marco to figure out the consequences. I needed Tobias safeguarding us and Rachel providing courage and Jake braiding our various plots into a single, coherent plan. Alone I was… stupid. Gambling things I didn’t understand for rewards I didn’t know. It had paid off with Aftran. It looked like it might possibly have paid off in Australia, but it was hard to be sure. But if I kept doing things like this, I was going to get myself, and possibly my friends, killed. I needed the team.

 

I needed sleep.

 

I needed to be home.

 

I laid my head against the van window, closed my eyes for just a second, and remembered what my house looked like.


	19. Chapter 19

When I woke, the back of the van was empty. Rob glanced at me in the rear view mirror. “You alright?”

 

“I heal well,” I told him, rubbing my temples. It had been a good, comforting dream. I wished I could remember it.

 

“We’ll have ya home in no time,” Rob said. “I’ll send ya right to that god’s-trick Memitor King. When you see him, tell him for me that he’s a mad duffer who needs to pull his head in, alright? This whole thing was a disaster and he’s playing with fire.”

 

“Does fire even hurt you?” I asked.

 

“He’s playing with ultra-high-amplitude, varied-frequency electromagnetism.”

 

“Sure, I’ll tell him as much of that as I remember.” I sat up. “Hey, can… can I ask you a personal question?”

 

“Ask what you like. I can’t promise an answer.”

 

“Why did you help back there? I mean, you guys normally don’t get involved in fighting, at least at home. But you ran straight back without even asking. And you can’t be too involved in the yeerk fight, all the way out here, so...”

 

“I don’t care about the yeerks,” he replied. “But Maruntu’s a mate. We’re very close.”

 

I blinked at him. Somehow, the idea of chee forming close bonds with humans had never really occurred to me. They always seemed to stick to their own little families and groups, except to maintain their cover. But then, I wasn’t really all that close to any chee, was I?

 

“It would take a lot more time than we have to explain,” Rob said, which I supposed was the polite way to tell me not to be nosy.

 

Five minutes later, we pulled up at a hardware shop in the smallest town I’d ever seen. Rob led me through a staff entrance and opened a janitor’s closest. He waved me in.

 

“Nice to meet you, Cassie,” he said, shaking my hand. “If you’re ever in the area again, do come see me for a cup of tea between yeerk battles.”

 

“I’ll be sure to,” I told him, as the closet door closed.

 

I felt the familiar dropping sensation of a very long, very smooth elevator ride. It seemed like forever before the doors finally opened onto a huge underground park, bright artificial sun illuminating green grass and clear ponds, dogs of all breeds running about and playing.

 

I wandered about until some chee noticed me and directed me to the elevator to the Kings’. Mr King pressed a coke into my hands as I entered the kitchen.

 

“We’ve already called your – ” he began, only to be interrupted by a knock at the door. “Well, I suppose that’s them.”

 

The Animorphs didn’t wait to be invited in. They stormed into the house.

 

“That’s it,” Marco said. “I vote we shackle Cassie to another Animorph at all times from now on. We can cuff her to Jake, and I’ll be cuffed to Rachel for solidarity.”

 

That actually got some weak laughter, although not from Rachel. Everyone was very restrained – no hugging, no tears. They were all trying to look as if my absence hadn’t bothered them. They were failing, but I appreciated the attempt.

 

“I’m fine,” I told them.

 

“Of course you’re fine,” Jake said unconvincingly. “You’re always fine.” He tried a smile. It almost worked.

 

“Go home,” Rachel said. “You look like you’re about to pass out. How much have you slept in the past couple of days?”

 

“I took a nap in the van.”

 

“A nap in a van. Ah yes. Master of healthy sleep. Home. Bed.”

 

I went home.

 

The chee who had been taking my place seemed relieved to be able to drop my life again. I was too tired to wonder if I should be offended or not. I just wanted to go to bed.

 

So I did.


	20. Chapter 20

At seven the next morning, Mum called me to the phone.

 

“Somebody who says they’re your friend,” she said, handing it over with a raised eyebrow.

 

I hesitated. If it was a coded message from an Animorph, they’d have given their name. Who needed us this time? I took the receiver. “Hello?”

 

“Hi, Cassie,” Yami said. “Rob says this line is perfectly safe for about five minutes. I just wanted to let you know that everyone is fine. Mum’s got most of what she needed on the property, and Grampa is getting a fake leg next week. We’re going to join the family again, and even if those guys do come looking for us, we’ll be far away.”

 

“Good,” I said. “I’m glad to hear it. Look, Yami? You know that story you told me, about the man with the moon campfire?”

 

“Japara? What about him?”

 

“Do you think he found his family?”

 

“I don’t know. I don’t think it matters.”

 

“The ending of the story doesn’t matter?”

 

“Not really. The point is, Japara made a very bad mistake. He tried to own up for it and make things right. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes Japara finds his family and they forgive him, sometimes he doesn’t. See?”

 

“I guess. I guess I just prefer happy endings.”

 

“The Dreamtime has happy and sad endings. The world it built has happy and sad endings. All we can do is try our best and hope.”

 

“Yeah. I guess. I wish we had the power to shape the planet and make the rules. That’d make this fight so much easier.”

 

Yami laughed. “Sorry, Cassie, that’s just the most whitefella thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

 

“What?”

 

“That’s what we do. The world isn’t just a dead thing we walk on. We’re a part of it, and we shape it every day through what we are and the decisions we make, as the rest of the world shapes us. That’s the whole _point_. What do you think living is?”

 

We didn’t have long to catch up. We exchanged addresses (he had a PO box) and he promised to send a postcard that didn’t mention aliens in any way.

 

I was glad we’d solved whatever problem the chee had been worried about, and glad to have been able to get Yami’s family out alive, if not whole. But mostly, I was glad to be home. With my family. With the Animorphs.

 

If my recent experiences had taught me anything, it was that I was glad to be fighting in my team.


End file.
